Monday Interview with Alec Cizak

Gritty. Dark. These two words often emerge when discussing Alec Cizak and his tales of struggle. Sobering. An artist who paints stories of poverty and hopelessness, he's both a writer and filmmaker. His work has appeared in Beat to a Pulp, Unloaded, and Crack the Spine. He is also editor of the fiction journal Pulp Modern. With publication of his latest work, BREAKING GLASS, set for July it's time to learn more about Alec Cizak.

                                     Amazon Author Page

On the hardboiled label and his love for the genre...

"I personally think of hardboiled as an entertaining form of brutal honesty. Hardboiled books and the language they’re often written in convey truths most literature does not. In fact, as literature goes right along with all the other popular entertainment that’s desperate to be nice and not “offend” anyone, hardboiled crime fiction is going to be one of the last places writers will be able to describe the world in an honest fashion. Attempts to avoid offending readers is a one-way ticket to fantasyland (and not good fantasy, either). You can’t write about crime and sugarcoat it. In fact, having had multiple discussions with police officers about the cases they’ve worked on, I feel even the most honest writers in this field haven’t come close to what really goes on in this world. If someone were to write about the average detective’s day in, say, the sex crimes unit, readers’ eyes would probably fall out and bounce in their laps from shock.

If someone wants to refer to my work today as hardboiled, I won’t get upset by it. I still think we need to push for separation between crime fiction and mysteries, as they are, in my mind, very, VERY different genres. Mysteries are inherently conservative in that they demand “order” be restored by the end of the book. A good crime fiction novel, on the other hand, has no such obligation and, I would argue, is much better when order is not restored."

Indianapolis...

"Well, I was born and raised in Indianapolis. It’s a city that’s not often written about. Especially in the genres I like to work in. There are a couple of YA authors from Indy who write nice, safe fiction for young people to consume. Our most famous contemporary writer (even though he’s dead), Kurt Vonnegut, almost completely ignored Indianapolis once he left (he’d always have a token character or two from Indianapolis in his books and not much more). As Indianapolis gets too big for its own britches, however, I get less and less interested in writing about it. I’ve lived in other places and I’m slowly branching out and writing about those places as well as towns I invented (similar to Stephen King’s Castle Rock) located in northern Indiana, where my grandparents lived when I was growing up."

The breakdown on BREAKING GLASS...

"So, BREAKING GLASS tells the story of Chelsea Farmer’s life after the awful things she goes through in DOWN on the STREET. It’s not a sequel, it’s not part of a series, it just has a character from a previous work in it. I felt I wasn’t very fair to Chelsea in DOWN on the STREET because the book was told from Lester’s POV and a scorned, middle-aged man’s perception of a younger woman is, more often than not, going to be a bit skewed. I got the idea shortly before DOWN on the STREET was released to write two more books involving those characters, each titled with a song from the Unholy Trio of Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and David Bowie. I discussed it with Jeremy Stabile, who owns and operates ABC Group Documentation, and he liked the idea. That means a third book will follow, that one named after a song on my favorite Velvet Underground record.

In BREAKING GLASS, Chelsea is an opiate addict living with like minded people roughly her age. They perform home invasions in order to steal things they can trade for dope. We realize, however, that Chelsea is much smarter than Lester ever gave her credit for, and the book involves her attempt to find a new life. It has crime elements in it, for sure, but it’s a bit more dramatic than my usual stories. It’s also a full-fledged novel and it’s the first one of mine that’s ever been published, so I’m very excited to see how folks react to it.

Later this year, or maybe early next year, ABC will also publish LAKE COUNTY INCIDENTS, a collection of Weird Fiction stories I’ve written that take place in those previously mentioned northern Indiana towns I invented.

BREAKING GLASS is scheduled for a mid-July release. Just in time for beach-reading season! I have been working on the third book for some time now, plotting it out. I sort of envision this series (which isn’t really a series) as similar to the Dollars trilogy – things started relatively curt with DOWN on the STREETS, they expand quite a bit in BREAKING GLASS, and then the last book will be epic (of course, anything over 40,000 words for me is epic)."

A few favorite writers, old and new...

"The writer who made the light bulb go off in my own head was Jim Thompson. The first time I read POP. 1280, I realized crime fiction was much broader than mysteries and drunk detectives. Thompson, to me, symbolizes freedom. Anything that disrupts polite society is crime fiction. It’s liberating. I’m also a big fan of Elmore Leonard. I can’t say I read much of what’s on the bestseller list. I know I should, but that stuff is so clean, so safe, I don’t see any risks being taken and that bores me as a reader. As for writers you don’t ever hear Oprah talk about, I’m a big fan of Grant Jerkins’ work. He’s probably the most literary writer I’ve read recently. I also enjoy Scotch Rutherford’s work for the total lack of care he has for social niceties."

The call of other genres...

"I would love to write science fiction. I haven’t written too much because I’m not really a scientist, so I can’t write “hard sf.” My favorite science fiction writer is Philip K. Dick and the world pretty much already looks like a dystopia, so it’s tough to figure out what I would write. I have a lot of respect for serious science fiction writers, though I often find their prose isn’t aesthetically pleasing and that makes it difficult to read their work. The imagination involved, however, is amazing."