Interview with Jonathan Woods, author of Hog Wild

  

Today it gives the Indie Crime Scene great pleasure to interview Jonathan Woods, whose novel Hog Wild has its debut on August 26.

Hog Wild is your latest novel, to be published by Close to the Bone Publishing on August 26, 2022. The blurb describes the book as “Part pulp noir, part dystopian gothic western, part satiric magic realism anti-war sex farce.” Is that a fair description?

Well, it is a wild and crazy tale and hard to classify, so a bunch of labels seemed to apply. Pulp noir: there’s a couple or three femme fatales that keep the hero, Ray Puzo, busy in and out of bed. Dystopian: the wild hogs are organizing and ready to take over the world. Gothic: E.A. Poe has always been a major influence on my writing and the Gothic mansion/ranch house on the Cross Ranch has a fate inspired by Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Western: the story mostly takes place on a vast South Texas cattle ranch. Satiric: humans and hogs behaving badly. Magic realism: super intelligent feral hogs that communicate telepathically. Anti-war: lots of killing of wild hogs and humans for no purpose. Sex farce: lots of sex between Ray and the Cross daughter Loretta, the Cross matriarch Amanda and even the sexy maid Adelia, the wild bitches of the piece.

The story begins when Ray Puzo, an ex-Special Forces sniper, is hired to rid the Cross cattle ranch in South Texas of feral hogs. Feral hogs are a real problem in the States, but this lot are different. Why?

Early on in Hog Wild the reader is told that the hogs, due to pollution and radiation, have become super-smart. They read books and communicate telepathically. “Whip-smart is what they are,” says Mrs. Amanda Cross, ranch matriarch. Orwell’s Animal Farm was obviously the inspiration for these intellectual hogs. As to why: the hogs in Hog Wild mirror the worst traits of humans. In fact, in Hog Wild pretty much everyone behaves badly. Kind of like the human race, as we shoot each other down in the streets, OD on drugs and destroy the planet. Kind of like Donald tRump and his band of sycophants and liars subverting democracy. 

How does Ray Puzo cope with this unique situation?

Poor Ray, ex-military sniper, thinks it’s just a straight-up feral hog extermination job. There are at least two million of these creatures in Texas alone. Ray does his best. But the hogs are organized into clans and legions and, before Ray knows it, the ranch is under siege. Just like mother nature is about to bite mankind in the butt with global climate change.

It’s safe to say that Puzo’s problems don’t end there. The owners of the Cross cattle ranch are as much of a challenge as the hogs. What can you tell us about the Cross family?

Besides the hog uprising, poor Ray must contend with the loony denizens of the ranch, including (i) a variety of horny femme fatales, (ii) Ned (the queer ranch heir) and his lover Gomez (the vengeful house-Mexican) and (iii) the by-the-book ranch foreman Charlie Lemont, Ray’s immediate boss. The ranch matriarch, Amanda Cross, hopes to marry her daughter Loretta to Ray and by means of his manly genes generate a new heir in the Cross tradition. As Amanda Cross says:

 

“It took a shitload of scumbags to put this place on the map. Gamblers, God-fearing preachers not afraid of killin’, confidence men, politicians, habitual criminals, sociopathic killers and regular killers. Hard men and hard gals, who didn’t let anything or anybody stand in the way of their vision.”

And if things don’t work out between Ray and Loretta, Mrs. Cross is not above having Ray fertilize her eggs stored at a Houston fertility clinic. Ray himself (who comes from simple beginnings in rural Tennessee) quickly develops a lust for the Cross fortune. But he finds the two Cross gals, Amanda and her psycho daughter Loretta, a challenge he’s hard pressed to deal with. Indeed, Ray finds himself caught between a rock and a hard-on.

Author Jon Bassoff says in his praise for the book “If George Orwell had taken to drinking mezcal with William Burroughs...he might have written something like Jonathan Woods’ Hog Wild.” How far is this book in the tradition of Animal Farm?

I read Animal Farm a million years ago back in high school. I haven’t looked at those pages since. But the idea of having animal characters taking on human traits (especially not the best ones) stuck with me and was the initial inspiration for Hog Wild. That and the massive problem of feral hog fertility in Texas and elsewhere. I wanted to write a story in the tradition of Elmore Leonard, Rabelais, Swift and Lenny Bruce, showing in mirror images (of hogs and humans) the worst of humanity.

How about Burroughs? A very different character to the quintessentially English Orwell.

William Burroughs is the weirdest of the Beats and a brilliant satirist. He has always held a special place in my heart. The second half of my previous novel, Kiss the Devil Good Night, is driven by a quest for Burrough’s lost suitcase, left behind in Mexico. No one knows what’s in the suitcase until the final pages of my novel. Burroughs left Mexico in a hurry after “accidentally” killing his wife while trying to shoot a cocktail glass off the top of her head. Human sacrifice used to be legal in Mexico but not after 1521.

In Hog Wild Burrough’s lunatic character Dr. Benway makes a cameo appearance. So, yes, Burroughs and his over-the-top novel Naked Lunch has a ghostly presence in my work.

You hold degrees from McGill University, New England School of Law and New York University School of Law, and worked for many years for a multinational high-tech company. What made you decide to become a writer?

Growing up I moved with my parents back and forth across the country, so in my many different schools I was always the new kid, the outsider. Books became a very important part of my life—imaginary worlds to escape into. The idea of writing books took hold early on. At McGill I majored in English literature. I read lots more great books. All this made it inevitable that I would take up writing after my legal career ended in 2003. It took 7 years for my first book to be published, a collection of gonzo crime stories titled Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem (New Pulp Press, 2010). The book was accepted into the 2011 Texas Book Festival and won a 2011 Spinetingler Award for best crime short story collection. New York Magazine called Bad Juju “Hallucinatory, hilarious imaginative noir.” Award-winning critic Jon L. Breen wrote: “The 19 tales of erotic or absurdist noir in Bad Juju are lively, imaginative, sometimes parodic, often darkly funny, accurately likened on the back-cover blurb to opium dreams and Quentin Tarantino...all executed with enormous skill by a writer of formidable talent.” With that kind of response, my only option was to continue writing. Hog Wild is my fifth book in 12 years.

You studied writing at Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Zoetrope: All-Story and Sirenland writers conferences and at Southern Methodist University (SMU). Tell us something about those experiences.

At Bread Loaf in 2005, Jay Parini was the “famous” writer who led my workshop group. We have stayed in contact over the years and he has been very generous and supportive of my work. He wrote blurbs for three of my books.

The best part of Sewanee (held at The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee) was French House where all the big-name writers caroused at night. If you (a mere plebeian) had the nerve, you could wander down to French House and hang out. As a result, I got into the habit of taking recovery naps in my car on those hot August afternoons. I also participated in an impromptu poetry slam with X.J. Kennedy, reciting from memory poems by Ed Sanders, Clarke Ashton Smith and Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” 

The Zoetrope: All-Story writers’ retreat was held at Blancaneaux Lodge, a resort owned by Francis Ford Coppola in the highlands of Belize. I know, rough duty. Coppola also underwrites Zoetrope Magazine that sponsored the retreat. We were a small group of about 10 wannabe writers plus Ben Fountain and the Zoetrope Magazine editor Michael Ray. In our downtime we toured Mayan ruins and sacred caves on dirt roads that meandered through the jungle. Because of bandits, we had a military escort on these excursions. 

At SMU I took several writing seminars in the night school. Had this great professor. She was about 75 and didn’t take shit from anyone. I was working on a draft of A Death in Mexico, I think. Each session we had to read an excerpt from our work out loud. To the amusement of the group, one evening I read a rather detailed scene of the protagonist getting a blowjob. 

Sirenland is held in Positano, Italy on the Amalfi Coast. Need I say more? The billet was the Hotel Le Sirenuse. Two-hour lunches in one or another café down by the beach. Cocktail hour with green olives and homemade potato chips. 

I remember fondly each of these workshop experiences.

You are the author of two previous novels, A Death in Mexico and Kiss the Devil Good Night. What do they have in common with Hog Wild?

A Death in Mexico is my most traditional crime novel. It’s a police procedural set mostly in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Traditional (yes, no, maybe) but as Cullen Gallagher wrote in the Los Angeles Review of Books: “Adventurous readers will savor Woods’ unorthodox mélange of sex and slaughter under the sun... Instead of Chandler or any of the usual suspects, the style of A Death in Mexico is more suggestive of Henry Miller by way of Graham Greene.” Henry Miller likewise rises like a giant hot air balloon phallus from the pages of Hog Wild. 

My idea in writing Kiss the Devil Good Night was to expand the absurdist, gonzo noir of my short stories into a novel, so it is very much a deranged cousin of Hog Wild. The Booklist review of Kiss the Devil Good Night could just as easily apply to Hog Wild: 

“Kiss the Devil Good Night is the literary equivalent of a Big Daddy Roth drawing: all bulging eyeballs, lolling tongues, and high-octane propulsion. Like Hunter S. Thompson crossbred with [60’s pulp writer] Gil Brewer, Woods revels in paranoia, hallucinations, hapless saps, and language both playful and profane. Exuberantly shotgunning pulp-fiction clichés (from Mexican sojourns to Nazi scientists), he slathers on film noir homage and shakes until it explodes like the radioactive suitcase at the end of [the film noir classic] Kiss Me Deadly.” 

Words such as gothic, surreal, western and pulp have been used to describe Hog Wild. To what extent is it a satire, or just surreal and subversive fun?

My first goal as a writer is to entertain you, so you’ll read the book to the fucking end, slam it down on the coffee table and proclaim: “Damn, that was a great book!” My second goal is to make you laugh. And then to realize that you’re laughing at how stupid and ugly we humans are as we blithely destroy the planet and ourselves. Vicki Hendricks (the brilliant author of Involuntary Madness and Miami Purity) said it best when she wrote: “Men are pigs and pigs are men in Woods’ rambunctious romp of a novel, Hog Wild.”

Which writers have influenced you, whether crime writers or others?

Hard to say, really. I read constantly, about 2/3 literary fiction and 1/3 crime. Some of my favourite writers include: Robert Stone (esp. his first four novels), Alexander Trocchi’s Young Adam, Elizabeth Taylor’s In a Summer Season, John Banville, Harry Crews, Ken Bruen, Patricia Highsmith, Susanna Moore’s In the Cut, Chester Himes, Lawrence Osborne, Barry Gifford (especially Wild at Heart), POE, Martin Amis (esp. the early novels), Denis Johnson, Thomas McGuane (love Ninety-Two in the Shade), Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, J.G. Farrell (esp. Troubles and The Siege of Krishnapur), James Salter (esp. A Sport and a Pastime), Muriel Spark, Ray Chandler, Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, Richard Brautigan, Henry Miller, Richard Price, Richard Stark, Jim Thompson, Wm. Faulkner (esp. Sanctuary and Light in August), Cormac McCarthy, Charles Portis, Kem Nunn, James Crumley, Michel Houellebecq, Vicki Hendricks, Flannery O’Connor, Vladimir Nabokov (especially Laughter in the Dark), Paul Bowles, Barry Hannah and Niccolo Ammaniti—to name a few. There’s probably a little bit of all of them lurking in my work.

To what extent is satire and surrealism a necessary response to these surreal times?

Global climate change (drought, extreme heat, flooding, super-storms), the Russian invasion of Ukraine, fentanyl and the murderous Mexican drug cartels, Purdue Pharma and oxycodone addiction, AR-style massacres, random police violence, rising crime, tRump-inspired Republican lies, homelessness, mass starvation, the pandemic, religious intolerance and hatred, Islamic terrorism, animal extinctions. Truly we live in surreal times. All created by us. How do we survive these nightmares? By satire and dark, dark laughter.

If you could meet any of the writers mentioned, who would it be and where would you go?

I’d love to spend time in a dive bar in Key West with James Crumley, Muriel Spark and POE. We’d close the place down. Or burn it down. Then gobble up a Philly cheesesteak over at Mr. Z’s before walking up Duval Street to the nearest strip club. 

The story has been called Tarantino-esque. Is that a fair description and would you want him to film the story, or another director?

I’m a great fan of Tarantino’s films, especially Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill and Inglorious Basterds. He’s become a standard cinematic comparison for “wild & crazy” crime stories, so tossing his name into a review of Hog Wild is a reasonable choice. One of my favorite recent crime films that I’ve watched several times is The Devil All the Time (directed by Antonio Campos from the novel by Donald Ray Pollock). But Campos isn’t my choice of director to bring Hog Wild to the silver screen. I wanted to mention that I liked his movie. I’m also a big fan of The Deuce, My Brilliant Friend and Spiral (a French police and lawyers show) on streaming TV. But to return to the question at hand, I think I’d pick Paul Verhoeven for the job of filming Hog Wild, maybe with Phil Tippett as stop-motion consultant. RoboCop, Total Recall, Showgirls and Starship Troopers are the perfect resume for a tale about super-smart renegade feral hogs armed with Thompson submachineguns and chain saws and nymphomaniac ranch ladies.

Preorder Hog Wild

About Jonathan Woods:

Jonathan Woods is an award-winning author of satiric pulp noir. He holds degrees from McGill University, New England School of Law and New York University School of Law and worked for many years for a multinational high-tech company. He studied writing at Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Zoetrope: All-Story and Sirenland writers conferences and at Southern Methodist University.

He is the author of two previous novels, A Death in Mexico and Kiss the Devil Good Night, and two collections of stories, Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem (featured at the Texas Book Festival and awarded a 2011 Spinetingler Award for Best Crime Short Story Collection) and Phone Call from Hell and Other Tales of the Damned. His stories have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Plots with Guns, ThugLit, Yellow Mama, Horror Sleaze Trash and other online lit-zines and in the anthologies Dallas Noir (Akashic Books) and Murder in Key West I & II. He lives and writes in an 1896 house in Dallas, with his artist spouse Dahlia Woods and their dogs Miss Pinky, Little Ruffy and Mickey Spillane.

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