But that's exactly what I did. And why don't you join us for a few? The more, the merrier, right? 

So grab a drink, pull up a chair, and let's get literary, baby. 

JK: Yes, Grants. As good as Dewars and the basic scotch of Scotland.  Bar scotch there, almost unknown here. So what are you drinking?  

DP: I'm a Bush Mills girl myself. I would have just had a beer or two, but I would have had to run to the bathroom every five minutes.  

JK: I hate it when that happens.  So what do you want of me?  

DP: I want all your deepest, darkest secrets. If you have any that aren't already in your fiction.  

JK: You better be more specific.  

DP: I just read on your website that you had screenplays for LADIES NIGHT and THE PASSENGER. How are the prospects on actually seeing those make it to film?  

JK: Duh.  I've had five options on OFF SEASON alone.  You take the option money and say thank you.  

DP: Hey, if you can make a living writing without doing some 9-5 job to support it, I suppose that should keep you happy, even if you never make the big screen.  

JK: You're absolutely right.  I get to write the next book, the next story, that's utterly fine.  I'd love to hit something big enough to not have to worry about health-care anymore, but I'm lucky to be doing this at all.  

DP: I had been reading a lot of your newer books, but just finished OFF SEASON and THE GIRL NEXT DOOR yesterday. TGND was really disturbing to me, and I don't disturb easily. How on earth do you find the energy to write something that heavy?  

JK: That was hard to write.  I knew I was treading dangerous ground, that if I didn't do it right it was going to be pornography.  I walked the walk and the main thing was the characters, the two girls, the sisters.  If I got them right and didn't exploit them, it made the difference.  I hope I do victims pretty well.  Because I proceed from them.  

DP: I think you do victims frighteningly well. When I first started reading your work, it made me wonder what kind of traumatic childhood you had.  

JK: I was the only child of an unhappy marriage but I can't say I had a particularly traumatic childhood beyond that. Once my parents divorced they were fine one-on-one.  And I grew up semi-rural, streams, woods, places to go to be alone and dream. If was a good thing.  

DP: How do you do victims so well? Do you think that's part of your acting background--getting into character, so to speak?  

JK: For me the victim makes the story.  Sometimes you victimize yourself, sometimes somebody does it to you, but it's that almost universal sense we have--we've all been hurt, and I like to open doors to those feelings.  

DP: I think your ability to do that is one of the greatest strengths of your writing. You have an amazing ability to zero in on the broken parts of a character, as well as their strengths.  

JK: My cat is now trying to type.  Help!  

DP: That's okay, let the kitty type. I'm sure mine will be up here soon...  

JK: Everybody's broken.  Some rise above it.  These are the people I want to write about.  A lot of my stuff is thinly-veiled wishes for empowerment for people I care about. INCLUDING kitties!  

DP: I know Henry Miller was an early influence, but you've  also mentioned JUSTINE (by the Marquis de Sade) as a book you got a hold of at an early age. As I was reading TGND, I was wondering if that might have been part of what attracted you to that story in the first place. I also wondered if you might have drawn on your impression of JUSTINE as a young boy when writing the narrator's reaction to seeing this poor girl stripped and humiliated.  

JK: As a kid I was a mess.  I had body-issues--I was a major fat-kid when Hollywood was everything gorgeous. I wanted to be Elvis and I was five feet tall and 140 pounds. I turned against myself early on.  I had security-issues, parent-issues, the whole nasty '50s bit.  My dad had a store where I could pick up state-of-the-art books.  I don't think he even knew what he had.  But I read Freud, Jung, Stekel (Sadism and Masochism) precociously.  Also read de Sade.  And yeah, his glee and his brains turned me on. I know I didn't think about JUSTINE or any of his work when I was writing  RIGHT TO LIFE but it probably informed it. Because later on I learned the difference between consensual sex and the nasty stuff.  I don't like the nasty stuff one bit. But de Sade's legacy's entered into a new age, more responsible. And there's something there.  I like to write about the edge of that. What's okay and what's not. There's plenty that's not.  

DP: Have you gotten any flack from the SM community about the nonconsensual elements of RIGHT TO LIFE?  

JK: Not yet, thank god. I hope that's because I'm handling it responsibly.  The first thing I ever did about the subject was back in the seventies, when I did an article for GENESIS on this new club, Chateau something.  I forget which now.  But their major bouncer/master/whatever, Sir George, called me and said, you got it.  You didn't cheapen us, you didn't exploit us. And I was very proud of that.  

DP: Your description of the head box was quite vivid--great imagination or personal experience?  

JK: Neither. Look for a book called PERFECT VICTIM. It's true-crime. I don't remember the writer. RTL was loosely based on that true story.  The headbox is in there.  Scared the fuck out of me.  

DP: Your description did the same for me. I'm claustrophobic as hell.  

JK: Yeah, then think about living in a coffin/box under somebody's bed.  

DP: I'd rather not. For some reason the head box freaked me out more.  

JK: Sensory deprivation will do that every time. And if I got it right, the smell of your own stale breath, your own sweat.  

DP: Oh, you got it right, alright. MASKS (with Edward Lee) had a hint of SM in it also, but was more erotic. Elegant even. How did you and Lee collaborate on that one?  

JK: I did about two-thirds of a story, then I couldn't figure out what the final mask was supposed to be. Lee had sent me three incompletes of his before then and I'd been able to straighten them out.  He did the same for mine. The last mask, the important one, is Lee's. The elegance is also Lee's. He studies up like a motherfucker. People think of him a splatter but there's always so much else there.  

DP: I could say the same about you and your work. Who would have thought the man who wrote THE BIGHEAD can write such elegant prose?  

JK: Try SHIFTERS, which he did with John Pelan and for which I wrote, gladly, the introduction.  One minute you're knee-deep in gore, the next you're thinking--and understanding--Kant or Jung. Lee's stuff keeps shifting. NEVER underestimate the guy.  

DP: Actually, I just got that book directly from Pelan off of ebay, but haven't read it yet. Any future collaborations with Lee? Or anyone else?  

JK: So far, the only person I've collaborated with is Lee.  I'm a control-freak, so it's not something I court.  Just something about Lee and me, a mutual respect I guess, and a mutual sense of weirdness, that makes it possible now and then.  

JK: GET THIS CAT OFF MY KEYBOARD! I love her to death, but she keeps wanting to revise me!  

DP: My cat is now on the desk, bitch-slapping me with her tail. Damn pushy cats. 
 
JK: So, let me ask you a question.  Who do you love to read, lately?  

DP: Uh-oh, the tables are getting turned. Well, after TGND I'm definitely done with you for awhile, and I mean that in a very good way. I'm a huge Barker fan, but I'm also a literary geek--Miller, Nin, the Beats. Poets--Baudelaire, Sexton, Plath, Cohen, Rimbaud. Charlee Jacob is quite an interesting writer.  

JK: I feel like I'm in good company.  My own new favorites are all non-fiction.  Nick Tosches' THE DEVIL AND SONNY LISTON, Jim Derogatis' LET IT BLURT: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF LESTER BANGS, AMERICA'S GREATEST ROCK CRITIC and Burrows & Wallace's GOTHAM, a history of New York City to 1898. Read 'em!  

DP: Oh, I just got THE KILLER INSIDE ME, but haven't read it yet.  

JK: That's goddamn good.  Also, on new fiction, don't miss Douglas E. Winter's first novel, RUN.  Killer! Wait, this is all about me, right?  

DP: I also read a lot of mythology and Jung (can you say EGGHEAD?)  

JK: Eggs exist to bring forth. I figure it's a good thing.  

DP: They crack pretty easy though.  

JK: Not if you boil them.  

DP: I think I'll pass on that.  

JK: Do.  

DP: Broken on the Wheel of Sex--perhaps a little Bukowski influence? You have to love any man that would write a book called LOVE IS A DOG FROM HELL.  

JK: Oh, I copied Bukowski shamelessly.  Why not?  What an original voice he had!  When I was first trying my wings with the men's mags, he was the one who spoke to me. Take Chandler and put him down and out and drunk as hell in Los Angeles and you had the Buk.  

DP: That book was rude, crude, sexist...and I loved every bit of it. I suppose I'm forever banned from  being a member of NOW for saying that.  

JK: Thanks! The wonderful thing about that period was that you could say ANYTHING and as long as it was lively and different, you could get it published.  Rude, crude, yes.  I was able to get out a whole bunch of demons with those stories.  

DP: Now we have all this fucking political correctness. It nauseates me.  

JK: Yes, I don't think any of the Stroup stories could be published in any magazine existing today.  

DP: Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.  

JK: I may.  There's a possiblity I may ressurect Stroup.  I'm talking about it with a publisher.  We'll see.  

DP: Yes! We want Stroup back! If you ever wreck your car in a snowstorm, and I have to play Kathy Bates to you, I'm going to make you resurrect Stroup.  

JK: You one scary bitch.  

DP: You just figured that out?  

JK: I'm slow. Interestingly, I find a lot of women like these stories now. When they were originally written for a predominantly male audience, of course.  

DP: Odd isn't it?  

JK: I gotta start thinking about gittin'. It's been fun. But can we start to wrap?  

DP: Sure. I know, you have to defrag your computer.  

JK: I think you run deep.  

DP: Shhhh, don't tell. I have to play the dumb bimbo so I'm not so threatening.  

JK: Ask me something profound, so I can sound like a fool.  

(LONG pause)  

JK: Tough order, huh?  

DP: Yes. Oh, the pressure...  

JK: You can do it.  

DP: What has it meant to you to be able to make a living as a writer and not have to work some shitty 9-5 job? And what advice would you give to other writers before doing something as insane as quitting their job the way you did--how many years ago?  

JK: I quit my job in 1975.  At the time Robert Bloch said to me, "Unless you have to, DON'T DO IT." He was being sardonic but he was also being truthful.  He was not a young man by any means then and he was still hand-to-mouthing much more than a man of his accomplishments should have been.  But what he was also saying was, maybe you DO have to.  And if you do, do it whole-hog.  Fall in love with it.  Respect it, always.  Give the work what it deserves.  Then, it's worth it.