Fandemonium
Rick
Schindler
Genre: Adult fiction, fantasy,
satirical novel
Publisher: Wattle Publishing
ISBN: eBook 9781908959218 |
Paperback: 9781908959225
Number of pages: 400
Word Count: 125,000 approx.
Cover Artist: L. Whyte
and Cover design: Wattle Publishing
Book Description:
Ray Sirico used to have it all.
Once, he was the brilliant and outrageous Clown Prince of Comics, who
reinvented the venerable superhero Skylord, and ranted and rollicked everywhere
from TV talk shows to Hollywood premieres.
But that was in the ’70s and
’80s. Now it’s 1993, and Sirico is a drunken has-been. His wife has left him,
his movie flopped, and his comics’ publisher is doing so poorly that its new
corporate parent has come up with a radical marketing stunt: the Death of
Skylord.
Still, Sirico has one last chance
to recapture the limelight: Fandemonium, the nation’s biggest fantasy
convention. But others are coming to the con too: Harmony Storm, the sex-crazed
actress who broke up Ray’s marriage; his former collaborator Tad Carlyle, who
now has his own company, and a troubled relationship; Fred D’Auria, a fanboy
fleeing adolescent traumas, and corporate conspirators who are plotting to
sacrifice Sirico’s greatest creation for motives deeper than even his fevered imagination
could conceive.
Together, antihero Sirico and his
superhero Skylord stand at the crossroads of comics and commerce, where quirky
creators, fervent fans, conniving businessmen and preening celebrities
converge. Deal-making, drug-dealing, lovemaking and truth-telling all collide
at the riotous climax of a fateful weekend that leaves no one unchanged.
Fandemonium uses the colourful
world of comics and fantasy as a microcosm and metaphor for media consolidation
and the excesses of global mass culture. It is at once a hilarious satire of
business and society, a portrait of an artist no longer young, and a sometimes
poignant look at a universal challenge: to grow up, face the world, and put
away childish things.
About
the Author:
Rick Schindler is an
award-winning journalist and a lifelong comics fan and collector. He is an
editor, writer and producer for NBC News Digital. Fandemonium is his first
novel.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fandemoniumbook
Twitter: https://twitter.com/RickSchindler
Publisher Twitter: @wattlepub
Publisher Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/WattlePublishing
Interview:
When did you begin
writing? Why?
I might have been 9 or 10 when I started writing my first
novel. It was going to about the kidnapping of Walt Disney, because that would
give me an excuse to set it in Disneyland, which was the most wonderful place
imaginable to me and millions of other American baby boomers, better even than
Oz or Wonderland because it was real. We knew it was real because we saw it on
TV every week, even if we couldn’t get there.
I even researched the novel; my mom took me to the library
and found me a biography of Walt Disney. I probably got a couple of hundred
words into Chapter 1 before I abandoned the project. It wasn’t that I didn’t
know how to write. The problem was that I didn’t know how to type.
Maybe I should go back to that project. Now it could be
about Disney’s body getting stolen from cryogenic freeze. All right, nobody
take that idea. It’s mine.
When did you first
consider yourself a writer?
In my junior year of high school I was assigned to write a
short story as homework for my English class. At the time there was racial
unrest in my hometown of Buffalo, New York, as in many American cities. I wrote
a story about the white owner of a little grocery in a racially troubled
neighborhood. I lifted the ending from a scene in Lord of the Flies – not the words, mind you, just a visual idea.
I don’t remember how it got to my high school’s literary
magazine; maybe my English teacher passed it on to them. All I know is that
when the magazine came out, there was my story, in print.
The magazine titled the story “Henry P. Gordon” after its
protagonist, because it hadn’t occurred to me to give it a title. One
character’s name was changed, because the typesetter apparently misread my
handwriting; I had written it in longhand. It was credited “W. Schindler” because
the magazine’s editor thought my name was Bill. It was not really his fault. I
was shy and didn’t know many guys (it was a boys’ school) outside my own
classes.
Some weeks or months later I was half-listening to the
announcements on the school’s public address system one afternoon when I was
surprised to hear my own my own name mentioned outside a disciplinary context.
It seemed my story had won an award, a New York Times certificate of honor. I
did not know it had been submitted. I had never even heard of the competition.
I guess the judges didn’t notice the Lord
of the Flies swipe.
That was when I first considered myself a writer, as opposed
to somebody who sometimes wrote things he rarely showed anyone.
Later on I had some other pieces published in that literary
magazine, fragments of a novel I never completed. I even got a poem published. But
I had been too shy to sign my name to it, and they put another kid’s name on
it.
I have not thought of these incidents in a long time.
What inspired you to
write your first book?
Fandemonium was
inspired by a 1995 incident in New York City that I read about in the press at
the time. I am not going to describe the incident because it would give away too
much of the plot, but it inspired to me to write a single-sentence synopsis
that eventually grew into a 400-page novel. I wish I still had that handwritten
sentence.
· Do you have
a specific writing style?
I hope not. Fandemonium
is written from the points of view and in the varied voices of multiple
protagonists — a rookie move, perhaps, but on the
book’s Amazon page one reader says, “each voice was distinctive and
compelling.”
How did you come up
with the title?
For a long time Fandemonium
was called Childish Things. That was
the title under which it went to many editors the first time it went around. I
don’t remember what specifically impelled me to change it, but I know the title
change came after I had rewritten the original manuscript from start to finish.
I found the phrase “childish things,” from St. Paul, kind of somber for a book with
a lot of antic goings-on. It also provided very little clue that the book is about
a comics convention. However, the phrase still appears in an incident in the novel.
When I got a new agent I wanted to call the book Smash-Bang Picto-Funnies, which I
thought sounded very cool and postmodern but which I now think would have been
a bad title, although that phrase also does appear in the novel.
One night my wife and I spent several hours batting a slew
of titles around. In the end we couldn’t come up with anything better than Fandemonium, which I think does manage
to convey some of both the subject and the spirit of the book in a single word.
I’m OK with Fandemonium. I think.
Is there a message in
your novel that you want readers to grasp?
Lots of them. Too many, maybe. But I guess the primary
message is one that many artists have strived to convey, but still bears
repeating: It’s OK to be weird.
How much of the book
is realistic?
Funny thing about that. The book is set in 1993, and I felt
I was taking poetic license with the scale of the comic book convention the
story is set around, making the fictional con bigger and crazier and more
colorful than the real cons I had been to. But in the time since I wrote it,
reality has caught up; comic cons today are, if anything, even bigger and
crazier than the one I dreamed up. I wrote
about that in my blog after visiting New York Comic Con last fall.
What books have most
influenced your life most?
Gravity’s Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon turned my head inside out so thoroughly that it has never
fully returned to inside in. I touched on that in
my blog here.
Few other novels immersed me like that until I finally got
around to Infinite Jest, which is
ineffable. David Foster Wallace is an immense loss.
If you had to choose,
which writer would you consider a mentor?
Rick Moody.
What book are you
reading now?
Don’t Let’s Go to the
Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller, a wonderfully written memoir about a
white girl growing up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
Are there any new
authors that have grasped your interest?
Jeff VanderMeer did a lot to obscure the boundary between
genre fiction and literary fiction with his Southern Reach trilogy, which is distinctive
and haunting science fiction cum horror. And that is a good thing, I think, because
that boundary isn’t useful for anything.
Why is Fandemonium a unique novel?
Because I was so naïve and clueless about the publishing
business when I wrote it that it never occurred to me to try and write in a
marketable genre or to a particular audience. I just wrote the sort of book
that I would find entertaining.
Why should readers
choose Fandemonium to read?
Because it’s fun. Because it’s a bit messy, on purpose.
Because it’s about comics, on its surface, anyway, and comics are a medium
whose vast and subversive influence is still sneaking up on us. Because comics
are transverbal, if you will, and brand themselves on our brains before anyone
can do anything to stop it, although plenty of people have tried. Because
comics are like rock and roll in that they’re disreputable yet irresistible, and
will never die. Because comics are like jazz (superhero comics are, anyway) in
that they are one of the few art forms indigenous to America and hence explain
a lot about America. Because I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t have some kind
of emotional connection to comics, whether they care to admit it or not.
I used to have some of my old comic books framed in my
living room. Sometimes when grown men, burly men who had come to deliver furniture
or do work on the house, happened to enter that room, their eyes would fall on
those comics and soften, and I could tell they were remembering the boys they
had once been. So maybe Childish Things
wasn’t such a bad title after all.
And readers should choose Fandemonium because comics are only part of what it’s about. It’s
really about people who make and love comics.
What is the message
of the book?
Wait, we talked about that, remember? You already made me
think about that, and I think I’m still OK with what I came up with then: It’s
OK to be weird.
Tour
giveaway
2 paperback copies of Fandemonium
for giveaway.
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