henever it is time for the legendary Showbread to call it quits, vocalist and creator Josh Dies will have more than his fishnet stockings, eye makeup and amazingly weird songs to be remembered for. For the past few years, Mr. Dies has been allowing us inside a different part of his creative mind. Nevada is Dies’ second, and some would argue most intriguing and twisted novel to be self published and released. To be completely honest, this book scared the sleep out of me. We caught Dies at his home in Georgia in between practices with his boys in Showbread. This writer can’t possibly encapsulate the experience it is to read one of Dies’ novels so I will let the author himself give you his take.
For those that didn’t read the piece we did on your first novel back in September, give us a brief explanation as to what got you into writing?
Joshua Porter: I like to read novels a lot. I had read so many at the time and really enjoyed it so much so that I thought that if some of these other people can do this than I can too. I was probably wrong about that but I did it anyway. At the time I was writing and thinking maybe nothing will come of this or maybe it will. I was just going to write it for fun anyway. The more I got further along in The Spinal Cord Perception the more I enjoyed reading it and I thought maybe someone else will enjoy reading it too. I decided to publish it myself and there were people out there who enjoyed it. It became fun enough for me to keep doing it and so I did another one and I’m doing another one now. It’s a lot of fun writing. I don’t know if I’m any good at it but I enjoy it and there’s a small handful that enjoy reading them.
This is your second novel. I have to admit, The Spinal Cord Perception is one of the most impressive and frightening books I’ve ever read. When you began writing Nevada, was there a feeling or pressure that you had to top the last book as far as the horror aspect goes?
JP: A little bit. Enough time had gone by and enough people had read it. It was a small amount of people who read it but relatively big to me, to someone who had never published anything. So much time had gone by where I had talked to enough people about it, had long conversations with people while on tour about it, I was pretty aware of what everyone thought of it, good and bad. I met some people who liked it and some who just thought it was dumb. I went back and read it again before I re-published it last year and I still liked it a lot but I saw a lot of things that I would have done differently. I knew that I didn’t want to write the same kind of thing again, I didn’t want to repeat myself. I knew it would be the same kind of tone and voice but definitely not the same spirit of that book. The Spinal Cord Perception is localized within one guy’s head, so much so that you’re kind of subject to whatever he is thinking or seeing, and often you don’t even know how accurate it is. I didn’t want to do that again but I did want to have some aspects of the unreliable narrator so Nevada is basically made up of journal entries from a whole bunch of different sources. A lot of them are just unreliable enough like they have some sort of mental handicap to where its not completely obvious to what’s going on all the time. The story is bigger, it takes place over a larger scope and isn’t localized to one guy’s head. I wanted to involve a lot of the same elements. I think that already within two books there’s a lot of reoccurring themes and reoccurring symbolism. I wanted it to be as fun and as crazy as the first. My favorite novels always have some crazy over the top element to them, not necessarily offensive stuff, the type of crazy stuff that is provocative in some way. I wanted it to be fun and interesting in that way but also have something to say rather than violence for the sake of violence or shocking for the sake of shocking someone but to have those elements in there to kind of wake you up as you go along.
Some would say that this stuff is really disturbing and might not expect it from a Christian writer. How do you respond to that?
JP: I respect that and understand it. I know it’s not for everyone. Just because someone picks up a book and it has over the top violence and they’re a Christian like I am and that book turns their stomach, I would never be one to tell them they’re a wuss or you’re dumb, you need to read that and enjoy it. I try to be forthcoming with the fact that it does have some stuff in there that might upset some people. It was a little easier going into it with this one because I think that most people, who have bought this book, read the first one and they know its coming from a dark place. To me, this book gets a little crazier than this one. In the first novel, the message I was trying to convey from a biblical perspective, its more tucked under symbolism. It takes getting all the way to the end of the story to uncover it and even then it’s not really obvious. I knew with this one it was going to be more direct and involve literally talking about the Bible and Christianity in the story. It is more violent than the first book and it has crazier things in it. The amount of people who have come up to me and said something like “You make me sick”, is really small (laughs). With that first book, I thought I’d be answering e-mails about it for the rest of my life but I prayed about it and I had a peace about it and thought maybe it’ll do some good and I can clean up any mess that it makes. I’m sure there were people who didn’t love that aspect of it but I wasn’t getting e-mails or asked in interviews what I was thinking. I mean, I get that about Showbread records. In contrast there were a whole bunch of people that did uncover the meaning in the book and it was meaningful to them and they caught onto the spiritual insight. I was less afraid this time that there would be people who wouldn’t understand.
What inspires you while you write these types of stories?
JP: The simplest aspect of the idea came a real long time ago when I was final drafting the first novel. I had this weird idea of dinosaurs coming out of a hole in the desert and then being intelligent and having some place in society. The imagery of that seemed really striking to me. Even while final drafting the first novel I’d write down ideas about Nevada. I really liked the idea and concept but I didn’t know where it’d go. I don’t think it was until the band and me personally looking into more socio-political things going on in the world, which came through on the last Showbread record, ideas about society and Christianity and the American Christian stereotype, the American Christian way of thinking and what people think of the American Christian and all these things that are upsetting to me, all these things that disgust me and just misconceptions that people have about Christians because of the American church. That’s the thing that kind of sparked the writing process, the idea that these creatures have some sort of political and religious agenda and how that might affect the world.
Something that I pulled from the story is that we as people are so starved for something new, something innovative and original that we might jump on the first passionate original idea that comes along, perhaps without really thinking about it. Would you agree with this as far as your story goes?
JP: Absolutely. Its true and I think that everyone is guilty of it at some degree at some point. Whenever there is some kind of charismatic thing that comes along people are really prepared to give it a chance regardless of what it is. It’s the Oprah tendency. If Oprah goes on TV and has some bizarre book about worshipping trees or something and saying don’t worry its still biblical and its good, read this book and mediate…if it’s presented in the right package its good. The story does paint humanity in a pretty bleak light. Some people said that it seemed hard to believe that these people would buy into these ideas. That was the idea for me that any of this could happen and so fast. I wanted the reader to think it was ridiculous. Not to be critical of people but people do gravitate toward things without reading too far into it.
If so, what do you think the world is craving so badly?
JP: To me, as just a simple person who has found something to believe in and has poured a great deal of dedication and research into what I believe in, if any person tells me they don’t crave some sort of purpose beyond the big hopes and dreams within the world type of thing, if they don’t think that at least they have some meaning or there’s some bigger picture here, it’d be hard for me to believe that. That’s the thing that brought me into Christianity. If there’s no point then what am I supposed to do? Should I just die or do whatever I want? Holding that mentality up against religion and faith and different faiths and coming back to Christianity, this is the only thing I’ve found and it offers something worth while and on top of all that it has more historical and philosophical foundation than anything I’ve come across. I think everyone is craving something like that even if they don’t know what it is. That’s probably why we’re so quick to pick up on things even if they’re superficial, at least they’ll distract us.
Tell us a bit about where you pulled the various names of the Ziz from?
JP: (Laughs) Those were fun and those were hard. I did an audio book version of it and I didn’t know how to pronounce half of those names. All the names are either biblical names for demons or the devil or they are actual demon names that come from the history of demonology. I don’t know where these people get this stuff. I would do this research and read about these actual demons that people believe actually exist. It was interesting; I had to look up a lot of Satanists’ blogs for the names and pronunciations. It’s surprising how many are out there, not just the “I am my own god” type of thing but the kind that worship demons. They’re all real names, they all come from somewhere, I didn’t make them up.
What can we expect from the new novel you are writing? Any secrets you can divulge at this point?
JP: I’m writing a non fiction book actually. It’s sort of a memoir. It tells the entire in depth story of Showbread. I don’t usually like memoirs as a general rule especially doing one myself, it feels a little self indulgent. It’s more of storytelling, remembering all this stuff that happened. It seems unbelievable to me and I lived through it. It has some spiritual essays throughout as well talking about the different stages that I’ve been in personally and the band has been in. it kind of reads like Bruce Campbell wrote a memoir about being a B-movie actor. It has an overall spiritual element as well as being the Showbread story. That’ll be out in November of this year. I’m also outlining a sequel to Nevada which will be out in 2011.
