Greg van Eekhout is the author of twelve novels, including California Bones, Voyage of the Dogs, Weird Kid, and dozens of short stories. His books have been finalists for the Nebula Award, Andre Norton Award, and Locus Award, and were listed by the New York Public Library among the best 100 books for children. “Across the Street” is his second appearance in Uncanny, a surreal flash piece set in a world where extraordinary things await, just on the other side of the street.
Uncanny Magazine: This story has a dreamlike quality, starting in a seemingly ordinary world and getting weirder as it goes. What did you know about the story when you started writing? What did you discover as you went along?
Greg van Eekhout: I have a bunch of short pieces that I consider part of a shared universe. Some are stories, some are vignettes, and what they have in common is the very basic idea that mundane urban and suburban settings are full of weird shit if you kind of blur your eyes, or set out to find it, or stumble into it. I’ve published dozens of them across different markets over the last couple of decades. A bunch of them are on the Escape Artists podcast network, and there’s a suite of them called “Tales From the City of Seams” in the eighteenth volume of Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link, and Gavin Grant.
That’s a lot more than you asked, but I guess what I knew is I wanted to write another entry in that milieu, and I wanted the character’s motivation to be the same as Ishmael’s in Moby Dick—to deal with a mood by stepping out of the ordinary.
Uncanny Magazine: What was the easiest part of writing this story? What was the most challenging thing?
Greg van Eekhout: None of it was easy, because I struggle with everything! But I guess the easiest part was coming up with the weird fantasy tableaus. The hardest part was telling a story about a guy whose only action is to cross the street a bunch of times.
Uncanny Magazine: You write for a wide age range, and at lengths from flash fiction to novels. Are there any themes or elements that are prominent across these widely disparate categories? Are there things that tend to show up more in your flash fiction than in other places?
Greg van Eekhout: Some themes I take on in both my adult and middle-grade work deal with agency, empathy, personhood, exploitation by the empowered, and how the megarich suck. My middle-grade stuff is probably more thoughtful than my adult stuff.
With flash fiction, I’m mostly just trying to make the ordinary seem strange and the strange seem ordinary, which is a paraphrase of something Novalis wrote. And while searching for the source of that quote I learned there was a German poet named Novalis and that their full name was Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg. Which is an awesome name.
Uncanny Magazine: “Across the Street” features a wide range of shops, cafés, and restaurants—if you could go to one place from the story, which one would it be and why?
Greg van Eekhout: The turtle garden seems nice. Just a bunch of little turtles swimming in a pond? I choose turtle garden. Don’t let me down, little turtles!
Uncanny Magazine: What are some of your literary influences? What’s something you read recently and loved?
Greg van Eekhout: The Tim Powers influence seems easy to pick up on from what readers have told me. Bradbury’s short stories. Twilight Zone. And for weird flash pieces, I don’t know if anyone’s done it better than Borges and Calvino.
As for what I’m loving, there’s a writer named Andrew Hulse, and he’s written short pieces about various characters from Greek mythology for The Ancients podcast. They’re lyrical, strange, and visceral, and they really should be collected in a print edition. I got hooked on the one about Demeter, but they’re all great.
https://heliconstorytelling.com/demeter-goddess-of-the-harvest/
Uncanny Magazine: What are you working on next?
Greg van Eekhout: I have a new middle-grade novel coming out in October. It’s about a domed company town owned by an Amazon-like corporation and headed by a Musk-like gross billionaire. There’re zombies, friends you can rely on, and a lot of jokes. Beyond that, I’ve got a goal to write more short stories. There’re so many great ones being published these days!
Uncanny Magazine: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!
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