I suspect it will be like my playwriting, a parallel creative stream whose influence on my fiction percolates at the subconscious level.
In some ways, DAM was my naïve attempt to put my thoughts about music into one book so I could move past it.Īs far as making music, that’s something I unexpectedly fell into after I finished DAM. And music has served as subject material for both my novels. I also think about the musicality of my writing-the sound of the sentences, the tempo created moving between sections, the overall rhythm of the plot. For Destroy All Monsters, I imagined the opening of Side B ( Kill City) as a sort of speed metal overture, something with a relentless rhythm and enveloping noise. I like art that happens faster than you can process it, that delivers a visceral and emotional kick that’s hard to capture with words. I wanted my first novel, Mira Corpora, to have the rush of a great rock song – say, something by Sleater-Kinney. When I’m writing fiction, sometimes I think in terms of music. Music remains a constant in my life and I’m still eagerly seeking out new bands and sounds, though I have slowed down a bit. For a while, I worked as a freelance critic to support my music habit and co-founded a successful jazz blog that got written up in The New York Times and Wired. There are concerts I count among the greatest experiences of my life. A shared love of music has been the foundation of numerous friendships and sometimes served as a sort of emotional shorthand. That alone was an ear-widening education.
Jeff Jackson: I’ve always been obsessed with music and was lucky to grow up within range of WFMU, the legendary free form radio station that played everything from hardcore punk to Yiddish crooners to Japanese free jazz. What role does music-both listening to it, and making it-play in your life, and how does it influence your fiction? Jackson and I recently talked about Destroy All Monsters, music, and the problem of an increasingly surreal reality.Ĭari Luna: Destroy All Monsters explores the place of music in our lives, the meaning we assign to it and the identity we draw from it. In this new work, he goes deeper and even darker, looking at the way violence can spread like a virus through a community, and asking what meaning music can possibly hold in an era when everything is performance. In his excellent debut novel, Mira Corpora, Jackson gave his readers a dreamy punk-rock dystopia through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator. Here the intense emotional connection we find through music when we’re young meets our very real national nightmare of mass shootings. In Jeff Jackson’s immersive new novel, Destroy All Monsters, musicians and audiences are terrorized by an epidemic of murder at music clubs.
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