NP but a peace offering to Thomas who isn't sending me directly to Trash. Yet.

[Mark Kohut]

This is part of a fine interview with Thomas Bissell, a writer I knew a
little before he was one; when he was 'just' an editorial assistant at the
WW Norton Company. Grounded, [Michigan and MSU, no Ivy] honest,
self-accepting, nice guy. Who once said a squib I wrote for *The New York
Sun *was good!

The whole interview is at Lit Hub if you are interested. It is about/around
his new collection of stories.


JC: “The Fifth Category” is a chilling story that reads like a mash-up of a
video game and a war crimes trial. (Or a new installment in Gears of War;
Judgment, the fourth installment, which you authored, revolves around a
war-crimes tribunal.) John, a law professor involved in writing the DOJ
opinions that opened the door to torture by the CIA in 2002, including
Guantanamo, wakes on a plane to find everyone else is gone. He is on his
way home from an international law conference in Estonia, where he has been
treated like a pariah. The ending is terrifying. As is the narrator’s
hyper-rational tone. What’s the research behind this story? I can’t get it
out of my mind.

TB: I was living in Tallinn, Estonia, and during one of my return trips, I
had a nightmare in which I woke up on an empty passenger plane. It haunted
me for weeks. One day I thought, That would make a great opening for a
horror story. I’d never written a horror story before, but was always
interested in doing so, if only because Stephen King’s work was a huge deal
for me when I was just getting hooked on reading.
I used to grieve that I couldn’t finish a novel, but the only novels that
should be written are the novels that must be written—and I’ve never had a
such a novel inside me.

So that vague wish—I should write a horror story–was just sort of sitting
there in my head, like a potted plant. Then I wound up watching the
Frontline documentary Bush’s War, which led to my reading War by Other Means,
John Yoo’s appalling and self-justifying account of his role in the war on
terror, which in turn led me to Phillipe Sands’s Torture Team, and so on. I
made my way through a tranche of Bush administration torture stuff, growing
more and more furious that more people weren’t furious. It wasn’t like this
stuff was being kept secret! It was out there, everyone knew, and no one
cared. I remember thinking to myself: How does John Yoo sleep at night? How
can he possibly justify to himself having let the genie out of the torture
bottle? Then I remembered my weird empty plane nightmare, which ultimately
gave me the staging ground to explore the questions I wanted answers to.

I wound up doing a lot more research … on Yoo, on how the government
functions, on international law. I had a couple hundred pages of notes
before I wrote the first word of the story qua story. At one point I
contrived a reason to fly to Stockholm from Tallinn, just so I could see
the what the flight attendants’ private area looks like in a Finnair
passenger jet. Pro tip: Be very, very careful while walking around a
commercial airplane and jotting things down in your little black notebook.
People have a tendency to get the wrong idea.