Friends, This is the last fiction writing episode for a bit, so I needed someone to talk with me about mediating the creation of dark art. So I asked another writer who’s been there to talk about violence, murder, and forgiveness in fiction: My Sister the Serial Killerauthor, Oyinkan Braithwaite!
SHOW NOTES
WHAT BOOK YOU SHOULD READ? One of my very favorite novels is also a sort-of-sort-of-not crime novel: Narrow Rooms by James Purdy. It’s absolutely ruthless, and bizarre. Imagine if John Waters wrote a serious novel. This would be it. It’s a nice blend of the tonally challenging aspects of both my and Oyinkan’s novels.
WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO? I talked about crime fiction in depth with another writer – and a master of the genre – Liz Nugent, back on AEWCH 104. Bonus: It was recorded just before the pandemic, and we talk about it with hope and trepidation.
MORE ON OYINKAN There’s plenty to explore, including illustrations and short works, on Oyinkan’s website. My favorite story there is “One Choice“, which has illustrations including the one below, made out of the words of the text.
The only way Against Everyone With Conner Habib exists is through its relationship with its listeners. Do you enjoy the show? Does it inspire new thoughts and conversations in your life? If so, SUPPORT THIS PODCAST via Patreon
Friends, So happy to share an extended contemplation about fiction and this podcast, and then one of my very favorite book tour events with you: a live conversation about horror, transhumanism, and Hawk Mountain in Dublin with your fav death expert Caitlin Doughty and nonfiction writer/cultural critic Mark O’Connell.
It was a sold out event and one of my favorite on the tour, which will continue in the UK in September. (I’ll also post one of the other tour dates as exclusive content for patreon patrons only.)
SHOW NOTES
WHAT BOOK YOU SHOULD READ? One of the greatest horror novels – which, like Hawk Mountain is also not really a horror novel – is Disgrace by JM Coetzee. Don’t read anything about it, just get it and read it. It’s incredible.4
WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO? I talked about the horrors of technologies – as well as its occult promise and beauty – with anthroposophist writer Andrew Linnell on AEWCH 183.
MORE ON CAITLIN AND MARK If you follow the links to their respective AEWCH episodes you’ll find lots there -here’s Caitlin Doughty on AEWCH 174 and Mark O’Connell on AEWCH 105.
Friends, Hawk Mountainis now available in the US in book and audio formats!
(Irish/UK/Australian readers, you have a couple more weeks to preorder/wait until it comes out on the 21st!)
So…I made myself the guest, and my friend and collaborator Una Mullally, who is an expert interviewer, asked me the questions. This was an extremely satisfying conversation — the kind of experience I always hope my guests will end the show feeling — and I’m honored to have had it. What comes up? The horror of high school, Kate Bush, the mystical presence of animals, Meister Eckhart, the soundtrack to my novel, time and manipulation, and more.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a better interview, to be honest.
And? THERE ARE NO SPOILERS! Somehow she managed to turn this into a great conversation about literature without messing with it.
The US tour starts next week, and I’ll post a normal ep then too. Until then, enjoy, and go get the book and come to the readings and tell your pals and say hello!
One of the New York Times’s 12 Books To Read in July 2022
“Hawk Mountain is a suspenseful, shocking and ultimately poignant study of anguished conflict, both domestic and internal. Incisively written and intensely imagined, it’s the novelistic debut of a real original.” – Ramsey Campbell
“The opening lines of HawkMountain plummet you into an atmosphere of creeping dread and precarious restraint that won’t let up until the final, shocking moments.” – Caitlin Doughty
“A moving and unflinching portrayal of a man caught in a trap of his own making, but willing to do almost anything―to almost anybody―if it will keep him from having to face up to himself. HawkMountain is a wonderfully bleak and beautifully written debut.” – BrianEvenson
“A brilliantly disturbing, expertly crafted literary noir that will stick with you long after you put it down. Conner Habib has written a flawless meditation on the fruitless, but eternally human, effort to kill off the parts of ourselves we cannot love―literally and metaphorically. I love this book.” – Sara Gran
“HawkMountain is deft horror, made of precise strikes into our most vulnerable psychic terrain… Finally, a horror story that knows cisheteropatriarchy is the villain!” – Andrea Lawlor
“Tender, horrifying, utterly transfixing.” – Kelly Link
“Dripping with menace from the first page, this story of childhood enemies meeting up fifteen years later is utterly enthralling. Brilliantly written with homoerotic undertones, this savage tale is uncompromising in its reflection of teen friendships and isolation, and unflinching in its examination of the delicacy of the human body. There is gold among the gore. I found it compelling, shocking, and beautiful.” – Liz Nugent
“Conner Habib writes with an hallucinatory precision, and a kind of merciless humanity, about the poisonous work of repression. His forebears-Poe, Highsmith, even classical tragedy-are clear, but his originality is clearer still. Hawk Mountain is a work of strange, glittering darkness.” – Mark O’Connell
“A deeply disturbing yet, somehow, soaring novel I won’t soon forget. It plumbs the depths of traumatized characters trapped within our damaging culture. I couldn’t look away, even when I was looking from between my fingers.” – Paul Tremblay
Against Everyone With Conner Habib is funded exclusively by listeners like you. Do you find value in this show? If so, support the podcast. SUPPORT THIS PODCAST viaPatreon
Friends,
As I get ready for the release of Hawk Mountain, I find myself wanting to talk to writers more and more. For advice, for good company, and honestly just because I’m so excited.
So for this episode, I talk to the much-celebrated author of the novel Memorialand story collection Lot, Bryan Washington! Memorial is a sort of negative universe version of Hawk Mountain – it uses time in a similar way (but different!) and examines the unsaid in a similar way (but different!) and the outcomes for the characters are very, very different (but similar!). After reading it, I felt enlivened and heartbroken at once. So then I read his story collection, Lot. Then, right away, I invited him onto the show.
Bryan and I talk about desire, identity in fiction, the way writers are asked about process all the time, the productiveness of marginalization, movies, and more. This is one of my very favorite episodes.
What a great conversation.
SHOW NOTES
WHAT BOOK YOU SHOULD READ? Bryan and I are both deeply influenced by film. One filmmaker I bring up on the show is Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the notorious and deeply driven melodramatic auteur. I love his work, and I love this book of interviews with him, TheAnarchy of the Imagination.
WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO? There are some deep parallels on this episode with themes touched on on AEWCH 149 featuring Carmen Maria Machado, although Carmen and I go at it in an entirely different way!
WHAT SHOULD YOU LOOK INTO FURTHER? I talked with Samuel Delaney about fiction, sexual identity, and philosophy years ago, before I had a podcast. Here’s the whole conversation!
Holy shit friends it’s my BOOOOOOK! It comes out from Norton on July 5 (Doubleday/Penguin in Ireland/UK/Australia July 21), so preorder to have it delivered on pub date and be the coolest literary horror reader on your block. Here’s how to order from Amazon and indie booksellers!
Friends, Here’s a special episode of Against Everyone With Conner Habib about my debut novel of psychological tension, desire, and violence, Hawk Mountain. I read from the novel’s first pages, I talk about how it came together, about being a writer, and also about a blurb from one of my heroes which is still blowing my mind.
Importantly, though, I also talk about preorders! Preorders are so important to an author, a fact which I just discovered since, uh, I’ve never published a book before. But anyway, instead of just saying “it’s important,” here’s why.
WHEN YOU PREORDER MY BOOK YOU
Boost the first week of sales! Preorders are tacked on to the first week of sales figures, which are key in how much publicity/promotion the book gets.
Get all the right people talking about the book! This includes distributors and publishers in foreign countries, then media and…well, you can see where this is going. A book with strong pre-sales enters into the world dancing!
Get bookstores and organizations interested in events with me. Which means there’s a better chance that I’ll come to your town*
Get the book right away! Like, right away. The day it comes out with some sites below.
SO PREORDER HAWK MOUNTAIN HERE! US RELEASE DATE, JULY 5
Bookshop.org US– The site is the site I use for all book recommendations, since it supports independent bookstores. When you order a book from Bookshop, it finds the closest indie store and sends it to you from there. It works just as well as Amazon 99% of the time, in my experience.
Amazon US – the big cheese, of course. The best thing about ordering from Amazon is that you’ll get it day of publication.
The Gutter Bookshop – Ireland only. If you want a signed copy from a local store in Dublin, order from this gay-owned shop!
Look, obviously I think my novel is good, but if that’s not enough to convince you, here’s some of the advanced prasie:
“Conner Habib’s debut novel is a bleak, dark adrenaline rush.”** – Clive Barker
“Hawk Mountain is a suspenseful, shocking and ultimately poignant study of anguished conflict, both domestic and internal. Incisively written and intensely imagined, it’s the novelistic debut of a real original.” – Ramsey Campbell
“The opening lines of Hawk Mountain plummet you into an atmosphere of creeping dread and precarious restraint that won’t let up until the final, shocking moments.” – Caitlin Doughty
“A moving and unflinching portrayal of a man caught in a trap of his own making, but willing to do almost anything―to almost anybody―if it will keep him from having to face up to himself. Hawk Mountain is a wonderfully bleak and beautifully written debut.” – Brian Evenson
“A brilliantly disturbing, expertly crafted literary noir that will stick with you long after you put it down. Conner Habib has written a flawless meditation on the fruitless, but eternally human, effort to kill off the parts of ourselves we cannot love―literally and metaphorically. I love this book.” – Sara Gran
“Hawk Mountain is deft horror, made of precise strikes into our most vulnerable psychic terrain… Finally, a horror story that knows cisheteropatriarchy is the villain!” – Andrea Lawlor
“Tender, horrifying, utterly transfixing.” – Kelly Link
“Dripping with menace from the first page, this story of childhood enemies meeting up fifteen years later is utterly enthralling. Brilliantly written with homoerotic undertones, this savage tale is uncompromising in its reflection of teen friendships and isolation, and unflinching in its examination of the delicacy of the human body. There is gold among the gore. I found it compelling, shocking, and beautiful.” – Liz Nugent
“Conner Habib writes with an hallucinatory precision, and a kind of merciless humanity, about the poisonous work of repression. His forebears-Poe, Highsmith, even classical tragedy-are clear, but his originality is clearer still. Hawk Mountain is a work of strange, glittering darkness.” – Mark O’Connell
“A deeply disturbing yet, somehow, soaring novel I won’t soon forget. It plumbs the depths of traumatized characters trapped within our damaging culture. I couldn’t look away, even when I was looking from between my fingers.” – Paul Tremblay
I can’t wait to share my first novel with you, friends. Please do get your copy preordered today! C
Against Everyone With Conner Habib is funded exclusively by listeners like you. SUPPORT THIS PODCAST viaPatreon
Friends, Happy New Year! Here’s the third in the series of episodes on How To Live in 2022. The first, AEWCH 175, was with occult scholar Mitch Horowitz, and the second, AEWCH 176, is on why reincarnation matters for us now. It’s not just the obviously spiritual that we must bring to bear on how to live now, though. It’s how we spend our time, and what we give our days and thoughts over to. For me, intellectual pursuits – especially literature, film, music, philosophy – are what I long to spend my time on. But I resent, deeply, the idea that they have to be “for” something, even self development. It’s not that they can’t contribute to self development, rather, that they only contribute to self development when we don’t force them into the role. So how could I do an episode on how-and-why-to-be-an-intellectual without forcing it all into functionality? Luckily, public intellectual, teacher, and philosopher Zena Hitz‘s, book, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life, is hugely clarifying on this. After reading it, I knew I had to speak with her. I hope this conversation is clarifying for you, too.
SHOW NOTES
WHAT BOOK YOU SHOULD READ? Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Othersoffers a great exploration of how to view art, the news, the world in general, without becoming numb: numb in the way we become numb to what we see again and again, and numb because of the narratives (or lack of them) that surround what we’re regarding. It’s a short book full of declarative and illuminating sentences.
WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO? A good companion episode for this one is AEWCH 141 with religious scholar Jason Josephson Storm. We talk about knowing beyond academia, beyond postmodernism, beyond the old ways of taking in knowledge… but without discarding the most useful aspects of all the above. We also get really weird about it.
WHAT SHOULD YOU LOOK INTO FURTHER? Since we discuss “spectacle” so much, I think I should direct you to the Situationists, the anarchist art/culture/politics group from 20th Century. One of the best entry points is via Ken Knabb’s super plain but very rich site, Bureau of Public Secrets.
FRIENDS:Do you find this podcast meaningful? Support it! This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon! Thank you so, so much.
Buy Ramsey’s books and all the books mentioned on/related to this episode via my booklist for AEWCH 168 on bookshop.org! The site sources from independent bookstores in the US, not a big corporate shipping warehouse where the workers are treated like machines. Plus when you click through here to order, the show gets a small affiliate kickback!
Friends,
Happy Halloween. I don’t really need to introduce legendary horror author Ramsey Campbell, but I will just say it was an honor to have him on the show. Very few people have done as much as Ramsey to deepen horror narratives, and very few have shown – with dozens of books penned – such a commitment to the genre.
• The calm moments in David Lynch films are the half smile on the government agent’s face thing I mention brought to you by Jon Ronson, who I spoke with on AEWCH 163.
FRIENDS: Do you find this podcast meaningful? Support it! This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon! Thank you so, so much.
Buy the books mentioned on/related to this episode via my booklist for AEWCH 166 on bookshop.org! The site sources from independent bookstores in the US, not a big corporate shipping warehouse where the workers are treated like machines. Plus when you click through here to order, the show gets a small affiliate kickback!
Friends,
One thing that’s come up many times on AEWCH is my dislike for the phony “radical” statement that “everything is political.” It’s enlightening I suppose, to people who have no political conscience or consciousness, of course. Yes, there’s a political dimension to the everyday, to entertainment, to design if we seek it out.
But the statement also relegates us to being subjects of the political sphere. As David Wengrow and AEWCH 99 guest David Graeber (RIP) point out in their latest book,The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, it’s not a coincidence that the word for politics shares its roots with the word for “police” and “politeness.” These are words of subjection and subjugation and submission. They are words of the polis, the location where governmental and religious decisions were/are made, a seat of authority.If everything is political, everything is extending, in a very real sense, from our subjugation to the political – it’s an infecting being, and one that does not deserve to determine the ground of being.
Maybe we can say something a little more definitive and truer and more interesting: that everything is weird. And that everything is weird defies the political. Why? Because if things are weird – and they are weird – then they can’t be contained just by politics. They are baffling, intense, unknowable, imaginative, uncanny. The weird is a question that gives us an individual vantage point. Everything unfurls from the infinite, from the plenipotentiary.
I talked about this a bit on AEWCH 148 with anthropologist Stuart MacLean; the way the imagination and what we call the real meet and inform each other. Go listen to it if you haven’t, but also consider the fundamental weirdness of reality. Everything, everything, is weird, especially the everyday, since it denies its weirdness. Just take a second: The space between things and the space between the atoms that make up things. The way literature works. The fact that different cultures experience things differently. Not being able to see your own face. And on and on.So this is where Weird Studies and its hosts, Phil Ford and JF Martel , come in. Each week Phil and JF explore the reality of the weird and weird reality. It could be the way Glenn Gould thinks or plays the piano, it could be the movies of John Carpenter, or the I Ching. Or it could be the episode we just did together: I was just on Weird Studies talking about Joy Williams’s bizarre novel, Breaking And Entering.
Phil and JF show us that the weird is everywhere, and may even be the groundswell of being.
• If you haven’t yet watched Twin Peaks Season 3 (or Heaven forbid Twin Peaks at all), watch it. • JF mentions the Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast, which you can find here.
• I don’t know too much about occult/magic writer Ramsey Dukes‘s work, but the guys have definitely gotten me interested.
• Here’s AEWCH 79 with Billy Bragg, all about a “socialism of the heart,” and AEWCH 162 about forgiving violent offenders with Dr. Gwen Adshead. And I talk about the nature of evil on AEWCH 165.
• “The hope is that (art) saves us in reality by damming us in art.” – JF Martel
• “The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.”from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
FRIENDS: Do you find this podcast meaningful? Support it! This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon! Thank you so, so much.
Buy the books mentioned on/related to this episode via my booklist for AEWCH 164 on bookshop.org! Bookshop.org sources from independent bookstores in the US, not a big corporate shipping warehouse where the workers are treated like machines. Plus when you click through here to order, the show gets a small affiliate kickback!
Friends,
I’m so happy I got to talk about animals at length on the show, given their importance in my life. And one of the best people to have a conversation about animals with is undoubtably Philip Hoare, an interdisciplinary writer and artist, whose books include his moving and almost unclassifiable memoir/nature writing/philosophy book, Risingtidefallingstar: In Search of the Soul of the Sea, his recent book about the evolution of art and how we think of animal, Albert and the Whale: Albrecht Dürer and How Art Imagines Our World, and what is probably his most famous book, The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea , which weaves together beautiful passages on cetaceans and images of whales in popular culture, particularly in the work of Herman Melville.
This was a beautiful and moving discussion for me, I hope it will be for you, too.
• Here’s a bit on selkies – seal fairies that shed their skin to walk around in human form.
• I’ve been working on utopia with my friend Una Mullally, who appeared on AEWCH 151 and AEWCH 87.
• I’m still so taken by Phil’s statement in this interview: “I could list all those things (that hurt me most about the way we treat the ocean) here but I’d rather anyone reading this went out to their nearest water and prayed.”
Conner Habib 