Talking with comic-book writer -- and novelist -- Mike Carey

By ANDREW A. SMITH
Scripps Howard News Service
Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Novelists frequently become comic-book writers these days, but Mike Carey is the rare exception going the other way.

"The Devil You Know" (Warner Books, $24.99) is Carey's first novel, a blend of horror and gumshoe fiction. It stars Felix Castor, a free-lance exorcist in a world where the supernatural is a commonplace, who gets in over his head with various ghosts, were-creatures, demons -- and worst of all, people.

This is in addition to Carey's versatile -- and huge -- comics oeuvre. His seven-year "Lucifer" explored the concept of free will. "Crossing Midnight" mixes Japanese gangsters and folklore. "Faker" examines the nature of identity. "Re-Gifters" is a coming-of-age graphic novel about a teenage, Korean-American girl. And then there are superheroes ("X-Men," "Ultimate Fantastic Four").

All this genre-bending -- and sheer output! -- behooved the Captain to ask Carey a few questions:

Captain Comics: Why did you blend the genres you did in "Devil"?

Carey: That was really the starting point -- that combination of genre elements, and the character of Castor himself. Who he is, and what he does. The other crucial thing in the mix is the way the supernatural fauna are explained. We've got ghosts, werewolves, zombies and demons ... they're all instances of the same thing, more or less. If a ghost forces its way back into its own dead flesh and animates it, you've got a zombie. If it does the same to an animal host, and shapes it to resemble its former human body, then you've got a werewolf. The persistence of the human spirit explains everything else, ultimately.

The noir stuff just came naturally as I was writing. Castor is a gumshoe exorcist -- an exorcist out of a Raymond Chandler novel. It's fun to write him like that, as a man who's essentially walking the mean streets and doing the only thing he knows how to do to pay the bills.

CC: Amazon.com already lists two more Castor novels. How many will there be?

Carey: The deal as it stands is for five, but I'm thinking at least six because there's going to be a big revelation in the sixth book that we're already building towards.

CC: The basic thrust of "Lucifer" was the concept of free will. Is that debate important to you?

Carey: Oh yeah, it's important to me and it's topical in a broader sense. Ever since the human genome project got completed, you can't pick up a paper without finding that someone's discovered "the gene for homosexuality" or "the gene for altruism" or whatever. It makes me want to tear my hair out sometimes. The determinist model of human behavior is having an obnoxious resurgence at the moment. I think it's grotesque and -- from a humanist perspective -- almost obscene. As if the things we do, and the things we are, were that easy to map. Lucifer is an unlikely torchbearer for humanism, but he seemed to work remarkably well.

CC: How do transition from serious fantasy/horror to superheroes?

Carey: I don't see superhero books as frivolous or superficial. If you take the whole Marvel and DC output from the (1960s) to the present day, they're the largest corpus of mythological texts in the whole of human history. Men in tights may seem foolish on one level, but you scoff at your peril. Is it fun? Of course it's fun! But I use the stories to play with ideas that are bugging me. Only the reader of a story can tell you what the story means.

CC: One of the themes in a lot of your work is that there's another, fantastic world in conjunction with, and affecting, our own. Another is exploring how we define ourselves, or let others define us. Am I on the right track?

Carey: I probably do play with the same ideas on different outings, and I'd certainly agree that external versus internal reality is an opposition that makes sense to me -- even if external reality turns out not to exist. ... Who makes the world? The answer, for me, is that we all do. But then again, it's a trick question, because it assumes that the world -- the one, the only -- is really there. In fact, we all live in worlds we make and furnish for ourselves.

And here's the coolest thing about writing. You're really making furniture for other people's worlds.

(Contact Andrew A. Smith of the Memphis Commercial Appeal at capncomics(at)aol.com or visit www.captaincomics.us/forums.)