Christopher Norris Interview

Whether writing novels (I use that term loosely) under his own name or creating visual art under the moniker Steak Mtn., Christopher Norris is a singular voice, a man beset by xeroxed visions of smoldering video rental stores, dog eared smut mags, and deconstructed anatomical charts. His latest work of fiction, THE HOLY DAY, is the second release from Rose Books.

Any attempt to describe this book would be doing it a disservice. A Floridian fever dream, an exploration of entropy, a lysergic potboiler, a poetic reverie, an ode to failure—THE HOLY DAY is inscrutable, grimy, and wickedly funny. It’s way out there (and I read a lot of strange shit). Norris pushes past the boundaries of form, genre, and language itself, brewing up a heady amalgamation of Nancy Drew, splatterpunk and Alain Robbe-Grillet.

In our correspondence below, Norris and I discuss his process, obsessions, and of course, the intersection of literature and cinema.

I’m curious to hear about THE HOLY DAY’S conception. When did the initial seed for the project start germinating and how did it evolve into a fully realized book?

Let’s see… THE HOLY DAY started as a screenplay called Corpse Paint, which I wrote around 2010. It was about a failed former teen detective, now a children’s birthday clown, who ill-advisedly gets called back into action when a niece goes missing. I never thought I would make moves to get it made… too ambitious for me; I love movies, and at that time, I enjoyed writing screenplays for fun. I sat on it until around 2019 when I started Frankensteining (cut the birthday clown shit, made it about going on a nice solo vacation and maybe looking for the niece) it into THE HOLY DAY. Also, for fun. Then that virus vacation hit a little white later, which was excellent as it gave me tons of free time to fuck around and get it done.

Was there a central image, idea, obsession that drove your writing?

1. I love failures. 2. I love mysteries. 3. The ultimate fictional character is a smart young person. To me, the coolest mix of 2 and 3 is a teenage girl who solves crimes. Nancy Drew. Nancy Drew rules. Sure, most of the books (and TV shows and movies that aren’t the 30s series) aren’t great. But the character is great. Now, I was (and am) confident enough about my skillset to know I didn’t have the ability (or want to put in the work to be able) to write a straightforward story about a teenage detective solving a cool, clever mystery. Too hard, and I don’t get involved with anything too hard. It made more sense to lean into the failed, former character going on vacation aspect and get foggy and off-kilter and messy with the text, which I guess is a roundabout way of saying, “I experimented”… that lazy creative practice where anyone who can’t actually write a real book can push around words until something subjectively appears to be “finished.” I succeeded!

I’m not surprised to learn the book began as a screenplay. Your work always has a cinematic feel. A film adaptation would be wild. One can dream...

Really, with a looming mid-life crisis, I shouldn’t be a bitch and buy a sports car; I should go way dumber and attempt a movie. Are you reading this, edgy tech bros with cash to lose? It’s time to fund Bikini Wax (as seen in THE HOLY DAY).

I like the idea of a failed mystery or anti-mystery. A detective who just fucks everything up. I want to expand on your mention of the teen detective as embodied by Nancy Drew. There’s something peculiarly American about that genre. Also a certain perverseness—putting these blonde, blue-eyed Hardy Boy types in perilous situations. Those series also mix elements of the supernatural with crime solving, and even the composition of those books is mysterious, with many of them being ghostwritten. Your teen detective subverts these tropes. She’s like Nancy Drew as directed by Harmony Korine.

That’s too kind! I wish I were that good at making bad art. But, also, it’s important to note that the main character in THE HOLY DAY is a former teen detective, and not young, which is only sort of alluded to in the book, but she is in her mid-50s. So a very former teen detective. In interviews and/or random people I’ve IRL talked to about the book, I’ve been saying: “THE HOLY DAY is about a former, failed teen detective that, now in her mid-50s, after a life of total misery, goes on a combination One Last Case/doomed vacation. Think Nancy Drew if Nancy Drew had botched her young sleuthing career and for most of her adult life has been knocking around the humid underbelly of Florida Panhandle culture before getting a chance—a missing niece she barely knows has gone missing—to fuck it all up one last time.”

What attracts you to exploring and corrupting this territory? And how did you develop our less-than-innocent protagonist in THE HOLY DAY?

I wanted to write a book like Robbe-Grillet made movies (and sure, he operated like this with his books as well, but the movies are cooler to me): Genre as a jumping-off point to fuck around with cool ideas, worn-out themes, silly obsessions, corny visuals, etc., and having a shaggy dog, not-mystery, with a brain-damaged, sleazy, lazy, old-ass fuckup, who used to be hot shit 40+ years back, as its voice was, to me, the only way to do it. I am not a smart writer; my process is more intuitive, so there was a lot of fumbling around until it made sense (to me).

Did you grow up reading/watching teen detective series?

I never liked The Hardy Boys, fucking dorks, but yes, Nancy Drew. More it was, and is, I love the late 30s Bonita Granville run of movies: Nancy Drew, Detective; Nancy Drew, Reporter; Nancy Drew, Troubleshooter; Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase.

You play around with form a lot in THE HOLY DAY. The book opens with a lengthy poetic prelude and there are other lyrical digressions throughout. You employ the screenplay, epistle, quasi-memoir, transcriptions, found notes, borderline illegible scribblings, and plenty of artwork. It’s a wonderful combination—equally pleasurable to read as it is to look at. In your writing process, how do you navigate switching between these different literary modes? And design-wise, what’s your approach to marrying the textual and graphical elements? How does illustration/design inform your writing, and vice versa?

I usually switch things up because I’m bored. If I’m bored, chances are pretty good a reader will be bored, so I fuck around with the design, writing styles, etc., until I think it’s no longer boring… Or another way it could be seen is I switch things up because I am insecure about my writing ability, which I’m not because I’m really good, but having too much stuff/style is a neat sleight of hand to readers easily fooled by “shiny + things = it’s great!” math (which I am always cynically counting on). Now, that all would mean I think about how I write more than I do. I don’t. I write intuitively, short attention span unzipped, just doomriding the whip until it crashes… so, I guess since I’m known as a graphic artist over an author, THE HOLY DAY (and HUNCHBACK ‘88 before) is how a book should look: As cool as possible.

For me, the multitude of styles, voices, design elements, etc. added this wonderful sense of slippage and unpredictability. Lots of “What the fuck??” moments, and as soon as I felt like I had a grasp, the rug would be swept out from under me. Made for a delightfully twisted and compelling reading experience.

“I want to make books that feel active, musical. Rhythmic. Experiential. Like a movie. And yeah, sure, I run a spine of story (whether a reader picks up on it or not, there is a story, of some sort, in both books), and then I get to lacing it up with impressions, color, space, etc.,” is something I said to Chelsea Hodson a few months ago. Probably the clearest, cleanest thing I’ve said about intention.

Permit me to lift THE HOLY DAY’S hood and peer at its innards. As a writer, are you inclined to work linearly, or do you compose more randomly and then put the pieces together after the fact?

HUNCHBACK ‘88 was a Russian Roulette paste-up for sure, mixed from three screenplays and laced with scattershot pieces until it was “done.” THE HOLY DAY started from one screenplay; a more linear approach was in play from the jump, and then I shifted and stuffed in random items that I felt worked. The next two things I am working on (a screenplay and a novel) are proper, normal, and linear. No more fucking around.

What’s your approach to editing a multimedia novel such as this? How did the book evolve from first draft to finished product?

Chelsea at Rose Books has been telling this story about seeing what we thought was the final draft. She stepped away for a second to prepare for Rickly’s book drop, and a month or so later, I sent her a new final draft, which had 2,000 edits and a whole new chapter. So… yeah, I guess the simplest/corniest way to say how I do it is: I follow the work. And probably, if we didn’t have a release date, I would still be stripping and adding on the thing.

We’ve touched a bit on films, but I want to dive deeper into the subject. I said earlier that your writing has a cinematic quality. I think a lot of books get labeled as “cinematic,” but THE HOLY DAY and HUNCHBACK ‘88 both feel truly cinematic in that the text often presents itself as a montage of images—novel as film reel. I gather you’re a cinephile from following your work, and I’m fascinated by writers who also dabble in film, like Robbe-Grillet and Duras. How does film feed into your writing?

It’s true! I love movies. My one true enthusiasm. An ideal and efficient delivery system of all the arts sewn into one. I see both books as movies I’d have made if I made movies. I try to translate what I love about movies—the temporal impressions, the languid shifts, the tight jumps, the sprung traps, the immaculate vistas, the busted flats, etc.—into writing. So your “novel as film reel” observation means I am doing alright at it.

Are there any films you can cite as touchstones for influencing THE HOLY DAY?

Oh yes! Here is a list of movies that inspired THE HOLY DAY: The Green Ray (Eric Rohmer, 1986), Identikit (Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, 1971), Une sale histoire (Jean Eustache, 1977), I Know Who Killed Me (Chris Sivertson, 2007), Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, 1971), Bimbo’s Initiation (David Fleischer, 1931), Nightmare Beach (Umberto Lenzi, 1989), Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002), Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967), Whistle and I'll Come to You (Jonathan Miller, 1968), A Gentle Woman (Robert Bresson, 1969), Vendredi soir (Claire Denis, 2002), The Black Tower (John Smith, 1987), Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1971), Mansion of the Living Dead (Jesús Franco, 1982), Du côté d’Orouët (Jacques Rozier, 1971), Lady on a Train (Charles David, 1945), The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis, 1961), Malibu High (Irvin Berwick, 1979), Sérail (Eduardo de Gregorio, 1976), Tropic of Cancer (Edoardo Mulargia & Giampaolo Lomi, 1972), The Wolf Knife (Laurel Nakadate, 2010), Landscape Suicide (James Benning, 1986), Keep Your Right Up (Jean-Luc Godard, 1987), Wild Grass (Alain Resnais, 2009), La corta notte delle bambole di vetro (Aldo Lado, 1971), Yield to the Night (J. Lee Thompson, 1956), Belly (Hype Williams, 1998), I Start Counting (David Greene, 1969), L'humanité (Bruno Dumont, 1999), Variety (Bette Gordon, 1983), India Song (Marguerite Duras, 1975), La Rose de fer (Jean Rollin, 1973), Agatha et les lectures illimitées (Marguerite Duras, 1981), A Visitor to a Museum (Konstantin Lopushansky, 1989), Emanuelle in America (Joe D’Amato, 1977), Twentynine Palms (Bruno Dumont, 2003), The Ox-Bow Incident (William A. Wellman, 1942), Bahía blanca (Jesús Franco, 1984), Manhattan Baby (Lucio Fulci, 1982), La mansión de Araucaima (Carlos Mayolo, 1986), Crimson Gold (Jafar Panahi, 2003), An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (Chris Petit, 1982), Duelle (Jacques Rivette, 1976), All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979), Night of the Seagulls (Amando de Ossorio, 1975), Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati, 1958), Playing with Fire (Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1985), and Pola X (Leos Carax, 1999).

That is a stellar list of films and unsurprisingly eclectic. I can see you are a man after my own heart. You will appreciate that I named my son Umberto as a nod to Lenzi.

“So, Umberto, today, on your 8th birthday, I will show you… Man from Deep River. You are going to love it!”

Counting down the days until I can unleash Ghosthouse on the little guy. A right of passage in this family.

The Birds, the bees, and Humphrey Humbert.

Bonus question: Who is your dream cast (living or dead) for the film adaptation of THE HOLY DAY?

Rossy de Palma would be my ideal pick, followed by Melanie Griffith. Right now, both are in the main character’s age range. But if a time machine were in play, then Deanna Durbin, Joelle Coeur, Beaulah Bondi, Janine Reynaud, Anita Strindberg, or Cyd Charrise would all be sick.

You’ve been in the game a good while making art in various capacities—music, visual art, writing, film/pornos (yes, pornos can be art!). What sustains your creative energy? Or on a more existential level, why do you do what you do? Does the act of creation scratch a certain itch or is there a loftier mission in mind? In other words, can art save us, or are we just plum fucked? But maybe in the end the insistence to make art despite being fucked is what makes us human...

Oh man, you’re teeing me up to go full-blast Bad Time with these answers! Okay… let’s see… 1. Money. Which is usually not much these days, but any money is good when you don’t have money. 2. To keep busy until my time runs out. 3. It’s a job, not spiritual fulfillment. Yeah, it can be cool (money), interesting (closer to death with each passing minute), and healthy (for the ego), but so was working at Taco Bell when I was 16. 4. There is zero chance art can save us; like any bad habit or game of three-card monte, it can distract us from whatever we need a distraction from, but I think it’s naive to believe anything but dying can save us.

—photo by Robert Hickerson

Christopher Norris is the author of HUNCHBACK ‘88 (Inside the Castle) and THE HOLY DAY (Rose Books) and makes art under the name Steak Mtn.