If there’s one thing we all need more of, it’s a girl-meets-wolf love story. Luckily, Charlie Fox has us covered with his new book, Drool . To celebrate the release, Fox sat down with friend and fellow writer Alissa Bennett to dig into the novel, which he neatly sums up as a tale of “bad parental relationships, grief, and hallucinations.” Along the way, the pair discuss all things pyrophilia, their shared love of naughtiness, and even recite some Jane Eyre .
BENNETT: I just finished Drool . I read every page!
BENNETT: You know that this is my great pleasure, because we are real world friends. You’re one of the only people I want to see every time I travel to London, your ancestral homeland.
FOX: It’s wonderful. I love seeing you. It’s one of my favorite things in the world.
BENNETT: One of my favorite things in the world is that you’ve written two books now, and I haven’t even written one! How do you feel?
FOX: I feel good about it. I think it’s fun. It’s a love story, but it’s diabolical. It’s grotesque. It’s demonic. It’s full of drugs. It’s also got a kind of Dickensian vibe, I think.
FOX: All that gibberish I just said is in your notes?
BENNETT: No, just the part about it being Dickensian . That’s the great honor of your literary people, I believe.
FOX: Exactly. Pisses all over Shakespeare.
BENNETT: For those who are familiar with your work, and for those who are not, can you go over some of the classic Charlie Fox themes that show up in Drool ?
FOX: Bad parental relationships, grief, and hallucinations. Those are the biggies. What have I missed?
BENNETT: Classic British gastronomic fare.
BENNETT: And I think you’ve opened up a new door in the Charlie Fox pantheon of horrors, because your protagonist is a pyrophilic teenage girl.
FOX: Yes. I thought that was a really good idea for a heroine. I thought it was great.
BENNETT: Do you think she’s pyromaniac or pyrophilic?
FOX: That’s a very good question that only you would ask me. She’s pyrophilic.
BENNETT: I agree, because there’s an erotic undercurrent to her arson. Can you tell our readers about that?
FOX: Her name is Zoe Thrasher, and she’s aroused by fire and fascinated by fire and kind of bewitched by fire. Because of her feelings of depression and sorrow, the first narcotic for her is fire. Out of this kind of lonely life, she meets Wolfie. This is, of course, a retelling of Red Riding Hood, only the wolf and the girl fall in love and go on a kind of spiral together.
BENNETT: Is Wolfie a werewolf, or is he just a wolf-man?
FOX: My contribution to the whole mythology of the werewolf was that I wanted to deal with it as a pathology. In the book, it’s called Lupine Mutation Syndrome. It’s just a condition that he has, which means that he has a classic wolf-man body, basically.
BENNETT: Something that I have been finding a lot of pleasure in lately is that, in our great shared language English , there’s a word for every pathology. We don’t have a word for how it feels when you walk through a garden under a waxing moon, but we have a word for every fucking disorder a person has.
BENNETT: The word for the illness Zoe has is “teratophilia.” That means monster love.
FOX: Yeah. There’s a symmetry between Zoe and Wolfie, and they probably do form their relationship out of a mutual trauma in that way that you do when you’re a teenager or maybe a bit older. “We’re both really fucked up, so let’s—”
BENNETT: I think people do it for the duration of their lives.
FOX: Yeah. Maybe you never get out of it. See, I’m trying to sound like I’ve got some kind of handle on things.
BENNETT: “Charlie’s so grown up now. Charlie’s so mature .”
FOX: Yeah. I’m talking about it as if I’m over it; I’m not! I think that’s the thing that David Cronenberg is really good at; he’s as good as [R.W.] Fassbinder at dissecting relationships on the fault lines of trauma, and pathology, and fetish, and all of those things. That’s what he’s exquisite at. It’s not really the gore, which is just window dressing for these inquiries into the darker soft tissue inside.
BENNETT: I found Drool to be blessedly without body horror, which is a genre that I feel is being a bit overworked as we hurdle toward our cyborg selves. It’s nice to read a novel that traffics in these kinds of subjects, but isn’t about disgust at all.
FOX: I just think that things have become really schematic and tedious in terms of the way they get packaged. The body horror romance novel is now just another marketing tool, so we end up with all this prose that’s been shaved of any eccentricity.
BENNETT: Contemporary culture has a great passion for absolutely neutering things that in the not-so-distant past would for sure have been looked at as transgressive.
FOX: Yeah. It’s just too cozy. Not that I set out to do something that was really transgressive and dirty and gnarly; it just seemed like a natural way of telling the story.
BENNETT: But there is something about a love story between a teenage girl and a teenage animal that is inherently transgressive, and you can’t Brit your way out of that with me, Charles Fox. Before I say what I think this book is about, I would like for you to say what you think it is about.
FOX: It’s a book about these damaged people falling in love. Now you tell me what you think it’s about.
BENNETT: I think it’s about what it means to be a real misfit. I think that there are a lot of people who do misfit drag, but there’s a difference between being eccentric and being a misfit; there’s a huge difference between being cool and being a misfit. I think we also always can identify one another.
FOX: I agree with this, and I think Drool is also about a desire to escape. Zoe’s trying to get out of her body into a different body; there’s melancholy in the experience of being a dislocated creature.
BENNETT: And how does that function in your life? I don’t think a person could write a book like this without having felt it.
FOX: Yeah, I think that’s true. It’s a strange thing. I feel very dislocated from my own body. I have low faith in my own body, and I have dissatisfaction with reality. I think maybe the beginning of all art is the feeling that reality is disappointing somehow, and so we have a desire to enchant it, and bewitch it, and drug it, and do things to get away from it. But, of course, you can never really get away, so all the things that are liberating end up causing more trouble. I don’t want to say I wrote this book because I’ve got flat feet and a wonky eye. “I wrote it because of my limp.” Do you know what I mean?
BENNETT: But do you think that’s what makes you a misfit? Because I don’t have either of those things, and I’m a misfit too.
FOX: What makes you a real misfit and makes you a true outsider is having your own passions, and the obsessive desire to eat them all up and sink your teeth into them. You can’t get away from it. You can’t escape. It’s like the story about William Burroughs looking like a walking corpse, but he’s just walking around the neighborhood when he was a teenager. There’s the great story about him writing a book when he was seven years old called Autobiography of a Wolf , and his mum saying to him, “Oh, it’s a good book, but don’t you mean biography ?” And he’s like, “No, I mean autobiography.” It’s perfect.
BENNETT: There’s this very minor scene in the Dennis Cooper book Guide where the Dennis character is at a club, and it’s sort of a goth night, and everyone’s much younger than him, and everyone has stupid piercings and they’re wearing their outfits. Someone comes up to him and basically says, “What are you doing here? You’re too normal to be here.” He says a line that just stuck with me forever. He says, “Some people wear their darkness on the outside. I wear mine on the inside.” I thought about that quote reading this book, because I thought what’s actually kind of fascinating is that Wolfie wears his darkness on the inside, and I think Zoe wears hers on the outside.
FOX: Deep, that’s good, that’s so beautiful. That’s so gorgeous. I think Wolfie almost seems like the more well-adjusted person in a way, maybe he wears the appearance of almost being a kind of stoned Labrador. I was one of these boys. I probably still am one of those boys, slightly stoned and a bit wonky. On the inside, Wolfie knows what he’s doing, and he doesn’t give anything away. Zoe is the more obviously normal person, and she’s a complete car crash. She’s devastated. She’s looking for some kind of liberation or whatever. She’s looking for some kind of drug.
BENNETT: I like that you’re directly addressing how often drugs come up in this book.
FOX: Yeah. I mean, the book could be called Drugs ; I don’t mean that in a silly way. One of the things that the book is about, or one of the things that it gets its teeth into, is what is a drug? Another person is a drug. Drugs obviously are drugs. Food is a drug. We’re all constantly chasing these things, but all the characters in this book are trying to escape from something. Maybe that’s too vague a statement, but you come into the book in the aftermath of these various traumas, and the structure of the book was always designed to be like drool, like this thing that just drifts. The book is about seeking these substances and trying to—
BENNETT: Trying to find comfort in a deeply uncomfortable state. What was fascinating and fun for me is that parts of this book feel like when you and I go have some adventure in London together.
FOX: Yeah, it is like that. You and I are often in the mood for mischief, which is a huge drive behind everything that I do. I just like chaos. I always think of it as like a riot in a zoo or something.
BENNETT: I always want to push the mischief button to see what will happen.
FOX: We’re like cartoon characters. We both just appreciate an air of naughtiness.
BENNETT: Which in a lot of ways is what this book is about. It’s about how naughtiness, or mischief making, or light thrill seeking functions in a world that doesn’t want to accommodate it. I think it’s astounding how many people that you expect to be exciting are not exciting at all.
FOX: We’ve often talked about our disappointment in human interactions and how we want them to be more fun. I think, in a way, there’s a great innocence that the characters in the book are just hungry for some kind of excitement, some kind of freedom. One of the things I love about Zoe as a character is that she’s very honest about her urges; she considers the arson and the pyrotechnics to be a kind of art. She really thinks of herself as an artist, and she embraces those things, she goes after them. She talks about being stitched into the oppressive costumes that we’re forced to wear as people, and how it would be a mistake for her to accept that. It would be like when I worked in an office briefly.
BENNETT: Oh, like me? Like how I work in an office?
FOX: Yeah, but you’re seemingly able to trade your masks at will.
BENNETT: Well, someone once said to me, “Alissa Bennett working in a gallery office is the world’s longest piece of durational performance art.”
FOX: Yeah! You’re like Andy Kaufman in this role. When I was working in office, one day I showed up without shoes because I’d locked myself out. So I’d walked in and my boss said to me, “It’s like having a stray dog in the office.” And I said, “That sounds great!” She was like, “It’s not great, Charlie. It’s not great at all.” I was like, “This is diabolical.”
BENNETT: What do you do with people when you come to the conclusion that they’re no fun at all?
FOX: Get rid of them. I will forgive anything except being bored.
BENNETT: Me too. I feel chronically bored, actually.
FOX: Yeah. I think it’s a real problem that I would do anything to avoid. I think it’s very hard to be bored when there’s a fire in a room.
FOX: One thing I want to say is that this book was written kind of because of that part in Jane Eyre when she goes on that tirade against her aunt.
FOX: It’s so good, Alissa. She’s on her way to the horrible Christian school, and she stands at the window looking up at her aunt, and she goes, “Goodbye, Mrs. Reed. I hate you, and I hate everything about you! I shall never call you ‘aunt’ as long as I live, and if anybody asks me how you treated me, I will say that you were bad and hard-hearted and mean, and the very sight of you makes me sick.” And then she just leaves.
BENNETT: That’s great. I can tell that it made you feel really good to say it!
FOX: Yeah, it was exhilarating. I felt like I could be in there. I was like, “Wouldn’t it be great if this girl just went off and started a load of fires?” Just going torching stuff. And it’s a lot of that stuff that you were talking about earlier of, “I just want to see what will happen if you press that button.” So much of the energy of the book, the propulsion of the book comes from her doing that. “I just want to see.” And actually, one of the good things about her is that she isn’t too much looking in the mirror while she does that. She is just being driven by her curiosity, really.
BENNETT: Well, that’s probably the difference between going back to being a real misfit or a pretend misfit. A real misfit is never looking in the mirror when they’re doing their behavior because they don’t actually see themself.
FOX: It’s a great thing. On the day of the launch, I was around somebody’s house early in the morning, and I can’t remember why, but I just threw a bunch of glasses out the window onto the street.
FOX: Smashed. And my friend was going, “Why would you do that?” And I was like, “I don’t think I need a reason. I think it was just great. It’s just a perfect celebratory thing to do, to let all these glasses turn back into jewelry.”
FOX: It wasn’t motivated by anything. I mean, obviously on some level…
BENNETT: Well, right. It’s wasn’t to make someone think, “That Charlie Fox thinks he’s so bad.” It was truly, I believe, because you wanted to see the shards glittering on the sidewalk like jewels from a sunken ship.
FOX: Exactly. Beautiful. And it looked great, and it sounded fantastic.
BENNETT: I also want to address here that you have a particular affection for the apocalyptic side of Christmas.
FOX: Oh yeah, that’s true. A lot of the book is in winter. It has a seasonal shape, or whatever. One of my favorite things is my editor on this book said to me, “This is a children’s book, but one that’s just wildly inappropriate for children.”
BENNETT: I thought the same thing. If it ends up in a middle school, you’re going to be on the news.
FOX: Exactly. It’s going to be fantastic.
BENNETT : Whoopi Goldberg will be talking about you on The View .
FOX: I would love that. I would love to do a tour of young offenders institutions with this book. Bring them some costumes, bring them some stuff. We could do a puppet show.
BENNETT: Have a Christmas pudding. Throw a glass out the window.
FOX: Exactly. Smashing. Christmas is obviously every dramatist’s dream. There’s drama, there’s expectation, there’s scar tissue, there’s big meals—there’s such a capacity for everything to go horribly wrong.
FOX: Booze, drugs. Everything that you can throw onto the fire to make things worse, you can do.
BENNETT: Charlie Fox, what do you want for Christmas this year?
FOX: What do I want for Christmas? Fuck, that’s a really good question. I would like to hang out with the wolves again. I would like to go and see them.
BENNETT: Oh, tell us about hanging out with the wolves.
FOX: It was so beautiful. I went with my friend Oliver to a wolf sanctuary where a guy with a wounded hand got us to get into this cage, and then the wolves put their paws on your shoulder and they lick your face. That’s how they bond with you. And then we went and sat with them in this enclosure, and they told us that there was a guy there who would shoot the wolves in the head if they jumped on us.
BENNETT: I’m sure they’re all chemically castrated out of their aggression.
FOX: They were so beautiful. And then we howled with them, and when they howl, they sound like Sade. They sound so beautiful.
BENNETT: What is it about the wolf that you love so much?
FOX: I think it’s always been a thing that spellbound me, and I think I only really understood when I was there hanging out with them, which I think was before I really started writing whatever this is. But you can completely understand when they’re up on their hind legs, there’s something really human about them, the anatomy and the shape. There’s a deep kind of unsettling, but beautiful magic about them. They just own you. And that’s something that I’m always chasing.
FOX: Exactly. It’s the perfect lover. It’s the perfect thing.
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