Word Out 2011

In Dust City by Robert Paul Weston, Henry Whelp is a 16-year old wolf stuck in juvenile detention in a fairy tale world gone very wrong. Fairies used to make dust that gave people real happiness, but the dust in Henry's world is a crude street drug manufactured by all-powerful corporations, and all the fairies are gone. When Henry escapes from juvie, a visit to his imprisoned father starts him on a search for the disappeared fairies and for the ugly truth about the mob that controls the illegal trade in synthetic dust.

The author of  Dust City, Robert Paul Weston, was kind enough to answer a few questions from Word Out.

Word Out: Early tellings of fairy tales are often more violent and bleak than the contemporary North American versions. In the Grimm brothers’ telling of Cinderella, the stepsisters cut off parts of their feet in an effort to fit into the glass slipper. Is Dust City your effort to put the horror and gore back into fairy tales?

Robert Paul Weston: No, not really. Gore was never an explicit intention, but at a certain level I did want to be true to the originals. To be honest, while writing the novel, I was more inspired by hard- boiled detective fiction than fairy tales, which I saw more as a premise, a jumping-off point. That said, I was surprised the original tales are as gruesome as they are. What I wanted to do was consider what the modern world would look like if the Grimm stories were history rather than mythology. If medieval Europe was really populated by talking wolves, goblins, giants, nixies and all the rest, then what would a modern day London or New York look like?

WO: Speaking of hard-boiled detective fiction, there are also great elements of film noir in Dust City. Do you have any favourite noir films?

RPW: Noir films? Some of the ones I like best are Rififi, The Asphalt Jungle, Stray Dog, Berlin Express, Kiss Me Deadly,and, of course, Chinatown.

WO: Dust City is the first book you’ve published for teens. How was writing this novel different from writing for children, as you’ve done in the past?

RPW: My first book, Zorgamazoo, was entirely written in rhyming anapestic tetrametre, so it’s very unique—not to mention a very labour intensive way to tell a story. The main difference between that novel and Dust City was the freedom of prose. With Zorgamazoo, the problem I had was knowing exactly what needed to happen, but not being able to write it down. If I couldn't find words to rhyme or jive with the rhythm, then I'd have to abandon'the line. That was awful. Dust City, being written in conventional prose, was faster to write, but it was also easier to write myself into a corner. Guess they each came with their respective challenges.

WO: What did you read when you were 16?

RPW: The eleventh grade, huh? Back then, I almost exclusively read the detective novels of Kinky Friedman, who used to be in the band, Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys (I had one of their albums, too). It was also a stellar year for high school English, when we read Of Mice and Men,  Macbeth and To Kill a Mockingbird–all of which remain favourites to this day.

WO: If you could be any character from Dust City for a day, who would you like to be?

RPW: I’d say Henry, but he has some rather unpleasant things happen to him. Yeah, not Henry, please. Jack—I’d be Jack.

WO: If a fan of Dust City wants to read another book like it this summer, what would you recommend?

RPW: Why, my other book, of course! Zorgamazoo. The two have more in common than you might think. Or maybe Feed by M.T. Anderson. It’s a favourite of mine.

WO: Tha nks for talking to us!

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Psssst… If you want to read those original, grim Grimm Brothers’ tellings of familiar fairy tales, check out The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm.