John Michael Curlovich is a writer and curmudgeon based in Pittsburgh.  He has had more than 20 novels published, as well as numerous short stories.  For 10 years he served as Arts & Entertainment Editor for the award-winning regional monthly Planet Q.  He shares his home with two deaf cats, Mandy and Melanie, who he loves to be dominated by.

 

As The world re-acquaints itself with Anne Rice’s gay vampire couple Lestat and Louis in the Interview with a Vampire TV series, we thought you might like to meet Curlovich’s Egyptian vampires.

 

When did you first start writing?

Early in high school.  I started keeping a journal my freshman year.  I used it to record my daily life and experiences, of course, but I quickly realized that expressing myself in written words was enormously satisfying to me.  I quickly started using my journal as a kind of language laboratory, finding new and better ways to express myself in writing.

 

What is the greatest joy of writing for you?

I have to say that finding new ways to express myself—more clearly, more fully, more precisely—gives me great satisfaction.  When I’ve finished a story, when I’ve made it express exactly what I intended when I began, gives me a great measure of comfort.  And finishing a novel, completing such an enormous undertaking to my complete satisfaction, gives me a high like I’ve never gotten from any drug.

 

What are your five favorite novels, and why?

 

1. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.   Mad, anarchic, cynical, witty and wildly funny, it’s the best account of war and the military/bureaucratic mind ever written.

2. Robert Graves’ I, Claudius.  The early Roman Empire, brought to life with stunning fullness and detail.  Beautifully written, in a plain, straightforward style that captures perfectly everything from religious belief to love to madness and depravity.

3. The Collected Stories of Paul Bowles.  Strange and utterly compelling.  Bowles dedicated his first collection of stories to his mother, who introduced him to the writing of Edgar Allan Poe.  And Bowles’ stories, more than any I know of, capture Poe’s sense of the weird, the beautiful and the psychologically disturbing through a distinctly modern eye.  Perfectly brilliant.

4. 1876 by Gore Vidal, tied with his masterwork Julian.  Vidal is among my all-time favorite writers.  1876 isn’t usually ranked among his best work, but his urbane, witty view of American history is irresistible to me.  Julian does much the same thing for Christian Rome of the fourth century, with its tale of the “apostate” emperor who tried  to suppress Christianity and restore reverence for the ancient gods.

5. A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.  One of the great science fiction novels, an engrossing, entertaining story with genuinely epic sweep.

 

Which other authors have most influenced or inspired your writing?

The great, unsung science fiction writer Cordwainer Smith.  Along with Heller and Bowles, Smith expanded my ideas about just how much fiction can accomplish.  And Gore Vidal, more than anyone else, taught me how to write dialog and incorporate it into a fictional story.  Dialog is not just people talking; properly used, it serves a lot of other functions in a story.

 

What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? 

Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky.  

 

What is the first book that made you cry?

It was the huge dictionary Sister Felicita, my fourth grade nun, hit me with.

Seriously, though, it was Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, which I found a copy of and read surreptitiously when I was 15.  I don’t remember how I heard about it, but it was the first book I ever came across that treated gay people like me as perfectly natural, not as freaks or psychos.  In the conservative Catholic world where I grew up, such a thing was never even hinted at—and in fact was deeply subversive.  It’s not what I’d call a great book, far from Vidal’s best, but it opened up a whole new horizon for me.  For the first time, the sun came out for this gay kid, and the book moved me when few others ever have.