Interview with Matt Maxwell, Author of QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS

A few weeks ago I reviewed Matt Maxwell’s Queen of No Tomorrows (you can read my review here), and enjoyed this brief but atmospheric horror tale set in 1980s Los Angeles. Today I’m happy to welcome Matt to the blog, and I hope you enjoy this interview!

Welcome to the blog, Matt! Let’s kick things off with something easy. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Sure, but I’m not a super-interesting guy. I mean, the interesting stuff goes into the books. In person I tend to hide out in my office and spend too much time on Twitter or going down research rabbit holes. I’m a dad, husband, have two cats (one a new addition in the last couple of weeks), two geckos and far too many books (and comics.) I’ve got two degrees, hey it beat facing the real world for an extra year. I’ve worked in an arcade (in 1987 even, back when there was one in every mall), at the only ziggurat in Southern California, as a TA in thanatology and ethnomethodology classes, at a think tank with members of the Manhattan Project (don’t worry, I was just office help, not an actual smart dude.) I dunno, I’m interested in weird connections between pop culture things and neon and old cars. My copy of IN SEARCH OF on DVD is one of my prized possessions. Hopefully that helps narrow me down.

Your novel Queen of No Tomorrows has just been released from Broken Eye Books. Tell us about your path to publication and how you started working with your publisher.

(order link – https://www.brokeneyebooks.com/store/c24/The-Queen-of-No-Tomorrows)

I came across Broken Eye Books when I saw an anthology call for a volume called Tomorrow’s Cthulhu, which was near-future SF stories set adjacent to the mythos. At this point, I’d done several self-published books and made a couple professional sales (to Blizzard entertainment, writing for some of their online lore outlets.) But I hadn’t made a sale in what we’d think of as mainstream SF/horror publishing. So I sent in a story called “Chunked” (don’t want to explain it so as to ruin the surprise) and miraculously, they accepted it. Fast forward a year and a half or so and I got back in touch with Broken Eye to make sure that the world described in “Chunked” was okay for me to develop further, as a comic project that never got off the ground. They said that I could take it wherever, but they wanted me to pitch them on a short novel. That was what started Queen of No Tomorrows.

I’m just thankful that they were open to me doing something new. Yes, there’s plenty of standard horror/weird elements in Queen, but it’s a little outside the regular, particularly in what we think of Lovecraftian/weird fiction.

How would you describe Queen of No Tomorrows to readers who aren’t familiar with the book?

Forgery. Crime. Nameless horror.

The book is set in eighties LA, following the story of a librarian/forger who instead of simply copying some old book to sell, creates her own. It should be nonsense, with no power whatsoever, but things get weird once the book gets finished. It’s filled with all kinds of things that I’m interested in, and hopefully I wind together in a way that is compelling reading. I try and stick things with the characters, Cait MacReady in particular and not just let the cosmic horrors drive things. Sure, cosmic horror is great, but I want a little more than just that. And I was interested in having the setting be something a little different, filled with rockabilly taxi drivers, a weird criminal subculture, cops stuck on an even weirder beat and the kind of industrial clubs that your mother warned you about.

It was definitely weird, you succeeded! Queen of No Tomorrows has a dark and gritty, Los Angeles underground vibe that I loved. Were you pulling from your own personal experience of living in L.A.? What inspired you to come up with the story?

I went to college through the eighties into 1990, in Orange County. Not exactly LA, but went up there for shows and to go to record and book stores pretty regularly. And Tommy’s chili burgers, too. Always great after a late-night show. LA is a place that I’ve always been fascinated with, due to its proximity to my childhood home, but the notion that this was an utterly different kind of place than the boring suburbs that I spent most of my years in. My dad worked as a reporter for the LA Times until I was just about out of college, so I got a lot of peripheral exposure to the crime and crooked politics side of things just by osmosis.

I actually did end up living in LA. Well, technically the Valley, North Hollywood in particular. It was for about a year, while I worked as a digital animator at the same effects house that had done Babylon V and the 90s version of Voltron. And a few years before that, one of my oldest friends had moved up to LA, so I was up there maybe once a month. So I’ve got a kind of weird outsider perspective, but I just love the place. There’s nowhere else like it. And now that I’ve spent a few years actively researching the history of the city and state, my fascination with the place has only deepened. I could go on for a long time about how LA deals with history and how cultural history itself does.

As for the story itself, that’s a good question. I’m not sure I can point to one specific thing that sort of crystallized the plot and pulled it together. I suppose I wanted to work with ideas of fiction and reality, which is pretty plain right in the plot of the book. Fiction is nothing more than a series of lies, but those lies become beloved things, ideas, characters.

I’ve put together a big influence map of a lot of the things that I’ve thrown into the book, some explained better than others. It makes a pretty good visual guide to the sort of atmosphere and vibe that I wanted to tap into. Whether I succeeded or not is left to the reader

Here’s the map – https://www.highway62press.com/single-post/2018/09/19/MAPS-AND-LEGENDS—QUEEN-OF-NO-TOMORROWS-one-of-six

I love the map! Your website bio mentions, among many other things, that you’ve also written comics. Which format do you enjoy more, comics or novels?

There are advantages and disadvantages to both. Comics pass most of the responsibility of visuals to the artists who are illustrating and coloring it. That said, they’re a lot faster to write and to consume. Comics are a great way to tell a story, but unless you’re drawing your own comic pages, they’re really expensive. If you can find an artist who will work for free or back-end payment, more power to you. I never did.

Prose is a lot less structured than comics. Comics, you have to make sure that there isn’t too much happening on a page. You literally can try to put too much onto a single page of comics, where panels would have to be so small that they’d be unreadable, etc. Prose? You just start writing and keep writing. On the other hand, it’s all you as the writer. You have to lay out everything, describe everything (though I tend to be very brief in that regard), etc etc.

I like doing both, honestly. They exercise different parts of the brain. Of course, in prose, you get to really play with the language in ways that you just can’t in comics, even in dialogue.

Can you tell us about the meaning behind your Twitter and website handle, Highway 62?

Highway 62 is a stretch of two-lane desert highway in the eastern part of California, east of Palm Springs, going all the way to Arizona. It was a place that I drove around a lot in college, where all-night or weekend road trips were something I could actually live through. It’s a beautiful stretch of the state, if you like desolation and deserts and Joshua trees. Which I happen to. The name was evocative and suggestive of spaces kind of out there, maybe a little haunted, certainly not traveled heavily, so I stuck with it.

I’m a desert rat myself, so I get it. I’m anxious to read more of your work! Do you have any other projects in the pipeline that you can share with us?

I have two follow-ups to Queen of No Tomorrows planned out pretty roughly. But I’m not working on those right now. The current project is something with the tentative title of Voidmaw. It’s not connected to Queen at all, and is instead sort of a dark chunk of cosmic horror set in a decadent and decaying far future space opera kind of setting. It’s a lot more work doing background and setup, much less the narrative itself. Having to invent the whole world and not overwhelm the reader with it is a tricky balance.

Looking forward to it! Please tell us three things about you that can’t be found on your website.

I have a max-level warlock in World of Warcraft (which I’ve played since the original alpha).

I saw Star Wars seven times in its initial studio run.

I am allergic to all beers and melon and avocado and even cilantro.

I’m still having problems with the avocado allergy (my condolences!), but in any case, thank you Matt for taking the time to tell us more about your book:-D

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About Matt:

MATT MAXWELL was born in California, sometime between the JFK assassination and the moon landing. Lived there his whole life. Learned to drive stick shi in the parking lot of the ziggurat that you see in Roger Corman’s Death Race 2000 and went to school where they lmed all those so brutalist sets in Battle for the Planet of the Apes. He’s worked in video arcades and think tanks, been an animator, taught sociology, thanatology, and ethnomethodology.

His past writings include work for Blizzard Entertainment and stories in both Tomorrow’s Cthulhu and It Came from Miskatonic University from Broken Eye Books. He’s self-published a number of books, both non fiction/commentary and short/long fiction and was also the writer and publisher of the weird western comic series Strangeways.

Sure. He’d love to be on your podcast.