Interview with Paul Tremblay June 10, 2009 – Posted in: Sybil's Garage

For Sybil’s Garage No. 6, Devin Poore interviews Paul Tremblay, author of the novel The Little Sleep.  Devin and Paul talk about genre (and writing outside of), Mafia, and throwing chairs.

Here’s an excerpt:

“It sounds as if you do not consciously sit down with a mantra of “today I write horror”. Your story in Sybil’s Garage No. 3, “Holes” is also decidedly ambiguous in regards to its genre. Was that a conscious decision?

I think ambiguity is an undercurrent in almost all of my more recent work. As a reader, I enjoy stories that do not spoon feed and that can give even the most mundane scenes/occurrences multiple meanings or possibilities. Maybe it’s better put this way; I gravitate to stories with something to say, but that something to say always leads to more questions. To me, ambiguity is interesting, scary, and, well, real.

“Holes” was a very personal, auto-biographical story, one in which I wanted to have a heavy atmosphere of dread, even if the protagonist, or the reader (or the writer, for that matter) wasn’t exactly sure of the source or nature of the dread.

I think most of the best horror fiction takes advantage of ambiguity. Was Poe’s narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” just crazy or could he actually hear the heart, or neither; was the killer manipulating you, only trying to make you think he was crazy? Horror fails, most spectacularly, when our inherent state of ambiguity is ignored, when the lines of good and evil aren’t blurred or muddied.”

You can read the full interview here.