Wolf Interviews: Kelby Losack
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Heathenish was one of those books that seemed to come out of nowhere and was unlike almost everything out there at the time. Since then, you've delved deeper into this style that I've described as Walmart Noir. What got you moving towards cyberpunk in Mercy and Samurai Jesus?
Probably watching nothing but anime and Japanese shit for like a year straight. Nah, I don’t really know, it was a little bit of being bored with what else was available, 'cause I'm usually writing to fill a void. Like you said, wasn't nobody doing the Walmart Noir shit when I started it (which was a prompt from J David Osborne, who said "write bout your life, but don't focus too heavy on the crime.") Watch cyberpunk take off next, but when me, you, and JDO dropped those cyberpunk joints last year, nobody else in books was doing that. Especially not in this lo-fi, outskirts type of way. Plus, it's a little bit fan fiction. I read a lot of manga, and a lot of it is cyberpunk, like Tsutomu Nihei's BLAME! and Hiroya Oku's Gantz, and a part of it is just wanting to imitate and play around with the shit I think is cool right now.
The funny thing is that I never would've hopped onto cyberpunk without you two getting so hyped up about it. I used to see it as a very constrained genre, though now I see it as one with near limitless possibility. Why do you think so much cyberpunk feels like it fell out of a Blade Runner themed rave, and where do you see yourself pulling it?
I don't think the West went much further than the '80s with cyberpunk, so a lot of it's just a matter of all that shit riding the same wave. I mean, The Matrix switched it up a bit with a more techno goth/kung fu vibe instead of the neon noir of Blade Runner, but what Matrix influenced most was martial arts movies, so Blade Runner was still the flagship for this genre that not a lot of artists outside of Japan had been doing much with. I think the more recent hype around the Cyberpunk 2077 video game is going to influence more than just the Broken River crew, though.
Where I personally feel most compelled to take the genre is into the outskirts and the gutters. What's going down in the cyberpunk barrios and trailer parks? What's life like for the independent contractors who spend all day fabricating and welding parts to build giant war mechs?
Taking a page from Ghost in the Shell, I'm also interested in exploring the role of god in the age of machine. Where is the astral plane when consciousness becomes synthesized? As humans become more chrome and wire than meat and bone, where does the soul fit?
Agitator, the podcast you and J David Osborne host, has been going strong for two years. Can you speak a bit about how that came about, the journey it's gone through, and what made you turn it fully paid?
David and I go way the fuck back, that's my day one in this writing game and my brother for real. The show came about just 'cause we talk a lot on the phone--a lot about the craft and marketing of our books and a lot about Takashi Miike, our mutual idol, plus a lot about the hustle and struggle and family--and that's what the show is. It's a friendship simulator if you fuck with us, it's a source of inspiration if you tryna learn from our real-time revelations and mistakes, it's often an avant-garde noise experiment, and it's sometimes a source of controversy 'cause writers are lame and hyper sensitive.
We recently decided to paywall the whole thing 'cause we know what we're worth, and we're out here tryna feed our families and shit. Several thousand randos tuning in every week for free was pissing me off. We're out here building a multimedia company from the gutter. We're shaping culture while stealing groceries out of necessity. If you want to hear anything I have to say, that'll be five dollars, cuh. Part two, we lowkey built enough of a paid subscription base to be comfortable making this shit exclusively for them. Feels more like hustling than praying when you know the only people bout to hear what you're recording are people who pay you for it.
Right now it seems like most artists and content creators come from a background with a certain amount of wealth. There's also a blandness to much of it. Do you think these things are in any way connected?
I think blandness is a spiritual and cultural issue, not really a class one. Bret Easton Ellis and Ottessa Moshfegh come from extremely affluent backgrounds, but they be dropping fire. The blandness comes from the intention of generating content. There aren't many artists. An artist is nothing more than a vessel, possessed by a vision and compelled to express it. There's no way to formulate that to feed an algorithm. Bland art--if you want to even call it art--comes from shallow souls dwelling in mystical entropy. Some of these demons--whether they're the TikTok, Dimes Square, Hollywood, whatever type--some of them come from old money, for sure. But some of these demons drinking welfare milk in section 8 housing too. It's purely a soul issue.
You've done the audiobook narrations for a few of my books and you always kill it. How has becoming a narrator impacted your writing?
I think about what the shit would sound like if read out loud a whole lot more. Conversational and rhythmic has always been my writing voice anyway, but even more so, I be saying the shit out loud as I type it. And if it doesn't roll off the tongue, I'm tweaking it til it does.
That's something I noticed in your writing right away. It has that dynamism of spoken language. I think the ability to capture that is severely underrated and leads to a lot of books that sound like they're populated by aliens. Besides just being able to hear how the book sounds in your head, what other influences helped shape your writing?
Book of the New Sun, with its fluctuation of time and place throughout the narrative, broke me forever as far as being able to fuck with a linear story structure. With words, you can expand and contract time in a way visual storytelling doesn't allow. So that's a new liberty I'm taking with my own shit, fucking around with time. Manga taught me there's ways to express fluidity and visceral action in the arrangement of ink on the page, so I'm tryna translate that idea into prose. Takashi Miike taught me to treat each scene like its own thing, and to just do shit without thinking bout it too much. Lil Wayne taught me that language itself is an art. I'm way more interested in word choice than plot or clarity or anything else. Jack Mason, host of The Perfume Nationalist, taught me new ways to think of engaging with and describing senses. And chopping it up on the daily with the Broken River crew keeps the fuel tank full.
Final word?
Catch the wave at Patreon or kelbylosack.bigcartel.com
My novels:
Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster
Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion
Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure
Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera
The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.
Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.
Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers
Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.
Whether it's cyberpunk or not, the outskirts, the barrios, the trailer parks - that's always where my favourite stories come from. Love this.
Great read from a great writer. Really interesting breakdown of class vs soul in art.