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SPEAKER 1: See that man with the sunglasses by the bench? He's been following me all day.

SPEAKER 2: Meet me at the shipyard at 10:00 PM. No weapons. No phones.

SPEAKER 1: Wait.

[GLASS BREAKS]

Did you hear that?

[TYRES SCREECHING]

SPEAKER 3: If we're right, this thing could go all the way to the White House.

SPEAKER 4: I don't know what to believe anymore. Is everything a lie?

SPEAKER 5: I'm innocent. You got to believe me. I am innocent.

SPEAKER 6: It's time for our next thriller time conversation and in-depth on werewolves for modern times. Now they're not like their Victorian age counterparts or the cuddly ones that pop up in the Twilight series. These are werewolves that suffer a contemporary kind of discrimination, that experience, I think, a Snowdenesque brand of surveillance that draw you inexorably into their point of view.

In our latest daily circuit thriller time conversation Author Ben Percy joins me in the studio. He teaches at Saint Olaf. His new novel is titled Red Moon. Welcome.

BEN PERCY: Thanks so much for having me on.

SPEAKER 6: That voice. We have-- have you had that voice since you were-- since the voice changed?

BEN PERCY: Imagine me at 14 weighing 75 pounds with this voice. It was a little bit like James Earl Jones speaking through a sock puppet.

SPEAKER 6: It sounds affected, Ben. It sounds like it can't be real. It sounds like you're channeling a werewolf. Come on.

BEN PERCY: I am hairy on the inside and out.

SPEAKER 6: What I sense about what you've done here, I guess, is I feel like you focus less on the monster and you've tapped more into the kinds of things that make us really uncomfortable about the culture, the society that we live in today. Do you know where I'm going with that?

BEN PERCY: Sure. Some of my favorite fantasy stories, some of the most resonant fantasy stories, they channel cultural unease in some way. And I'm thinking about the way Frankenstein plays around with the fear of science and technology backgrounded by the Industrial Revolution, the fear of man playing God. In the same way, Invasion of the Body Snatchers tapped into the Red Scare. So I'm taking a knife to the nerve of the moment and what we fear now is infection and you need look no further than the entryway or countertop of any business in America to see the Purell oozing from it as evidence of this.

And we fear too terrorism as the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing so unfortunately reminded us. And so I'm sort of I'm braiding together these two anxieties and writing what I guess you could call a post 9/11 reinvention of the werewolf myth, but it's ultimately about the culture of fear that we live in.

SPEAKER 6: What's interesting about this culture today-- and I hadn't thought about what the legacy of Frankenstein, I guess, that the unease, the uncomfortable part of that was there even then. That was, as you were saying, I mean, what they were learning about the body, what they were understanding about how the inventions of that time were going to affect it. But we-- and maybe this has always been so, making trade-offs to assuage that level of unease.

I mean, and I'm thinking about the surveillance society that we live in. I mean, think about the way of how quickly they solve the Boston bombings and what the technology that they used to do that. We've gotten pretty comfortable with that technology.

BEN PERCY: We have. And I guess that's one of the reasons that right now as I brainstorm my next novel, I'm directly channeling that and thinking about this techno thriller that's sort of a mash up between The Matrix and The Exorcist as a result.

SPEAKER 6: What?

BEN PERCY: I'm always ripping from the headlines. I'm always trying to figure out what's making us uncomfortable.

SPEAKER 6: You're thinking about demons and surveillance. Is that right?

BEN PERCY: I am.

SPEAKER 6: Yeah? And where does your mind go on that?

BEN PERCY: Well, I don't want to give up--

SPEAKER 6: No. No.

BEN PERCY: --too much of the plot.

SPEAKER 6: Tell me in the larger concept of how you think about that.

BEN PERCY: Well I'm thinking about the darknet, which is a sort of subterranean internet that exists and all sorts of, as you would expect with a name like the darknet, all sorts of uncomfortable traffic occurs on this system. And in my imagination, it is a virtual underworld.

SPEAKER 6: No werewolves.

BEN PERCY: No werewolves.

SPEAKER 6: Why so interested in the werewolves in this one?

BEN PERCY: Well, I have reinvented the werewolf myth, as I mentioned. And I sat down at length with people from the USDA labs and medical researchers at Iowa State University in order to better understand these animal-borne pathogens called prions that, in my story, leap out of the wolf population. This is the same thing that is responsible for chronic wasting disease, mad cow disease. And I have it mutating in a human host and targeting the mind and affecting sexual impulse and rage so that this segment of the population since prehistoric times has been marginalized and treated as other.

And if you fast forward to today, 5% of the population is affected. They are forced onto a public registry equivalent to a sex offenders' list. They are forced to take an emotionally deadening drug called Volpexx. They can only hold certain jobs. And so, of course, there is an uprising.

SPEAKER 6: You know that idea of the other, the film that came into my mind as I was reading your novel was-- did you see the South African film District 9?

BEN PERCY: I did, and I was definitely thinking about District 9.

SPEAKER 6: You were?

BEN PERCY: Yeah

SPEAKER 6: Why?

BEN PERCY: Well, I love films and I love fiction that can be perfectly entertaining on one level, that can be popcorn entertainment, a thrill ride, and you can walk out of the theater or set down a book and appreciate it as nothing more than that and still feel satisfied. But if you look at it on that deeper level, you can see the political allegory at its heart. So District 9 is a perfect example of that.

There are so many other examples outside of horror. Look at One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. You can read that story and be emotionally moved by the situation in this mental facility and not understand that it is a metaphor for society. So I'm trying to appeal to people, I guess, on all different levels so that they can feel swept away. But at the same time, if they're willing to look deeper, if they're willing to be a strenuous reader, they can appreciate the careful carpentry at work and the subterranean themes.

SPEAKER 6: I mean, not to be political about this, but the rhetoric that is used even in the debate about immigration reform in some ways fits in to what you're talking about this morning. Again, that we are meant to be here and the other, how we address that, right?

BEN PERCY: Appropriately, I was recently in Oregon where they're having a bit of a run in with the wolves in Northeastern Oregon. And on a billboard, I saw this snarling wolf with a bloodied maw and it said over the top of the billboard something about beware Canadian wolves or kill Canadian wolves, or don't allow any Canadian wolves, something along those lines, in which it was playing upon, not just this desire to knock off the wolf population among the farmers, but it sort of played upon immigration fears as well.

SPEAKER 6: Yeah, that they're coming over the border.

BEN PERCY: I was thinking about it as an alternate cover for Redmond or maybe for the sequel Redder Moon.

SPEAKER 6: What's the run in with the wolves by the way there?

BEN PERCY: The same place that it is everywhere They take down cattle, they take down sheep and people want to be able to blast away at them.

SPEAKER 6: So how much did you actually understand about wolf behavior?

BEN PERCY: Well, I guess I should say that I have a long history with the werewolf and that I retain to this day an artifact, a research paper written in the sixth grade called Werewolves with an exclamation mark. That's how excited I was about the subject matter.

SPEAKER 6: I read that you were quite entranced with the werewolf myth.

BEN PERCY: And it had a table of contents that was only five pages long. And the final section called the Ceremony of the Wolf, I attempted to transform myself into my backyard beneath a full moon by smearing myself with deer fat. And anyways, I received a B minus despite my dedication to the subject matter. And I dressed up as a werewolf maybe every other Halloween throughout my childhood.

But at the same time, had a fascination with beyond just the mythology, with the psychology of lycanthropy and also with wolves in general so that I'm actually the sponsor now of the Werewolf of the Minnesota.

SPEAKER 6: OK. I have to say, that's really what I meant, was how I knew as a kid you were pretty fascinated with the werewolf myth. But how important is the actual behavior of wolves to the way you were thinking about these transformations that you created?

BEN PERCY: Not as important as Jekyll and Hyde was because that's really like the formative werewolf myth as I see it. And when the wolf is set free in my books, it's essentially an unleashed id. It's the wildness that is leashed inside of all of us that sometimes comes out when we're pushed to the edge due to rage or exhaustion, too much to drink, whatever.

SPEAKER 6: Yeah. There's this sense that it always is-- you're at the razor's edge of letting yourself surrender to this other being that wants to take over.

BEN PERCY: Indeed.

SPEAKER 6: Why are you so interested in that?

BEN PERCY: Well, in that way, we're all infected. If you look at what happens after any natural disaster, if you look at what happens in some families when the shades go down, you see that we aren't so far away from that time so long ago when we were all wolves ranging the woods.

SPEAKER 6: I think a lot of us like to think that we are far away from that and in full control.

BEN PERCY: Welcome to my mind.

SPEAKER 6: It's a dark and mysterious place, I have to say. If you're tuned in, this hour we're continuing our thriller series of conversations here and Ben Percy is in the studio with us. Yes, I know, you tuned in and you went, what is that speaking? He's an author and he's written a new novel about the modern myth, I guess. You say that. You're updating the myth of the werewolf.

BEN PERCY: Yeah, reinventing the mythology.

SPEAKER 6: And the book is called Red Moon. Now I want to ask you, I want to hear from you this morning about the films and the novels of werewolves that you particularly love. I mean, how do they fit in with your own mythology around the werewolf? Is it-- does it say something, do you think, about larger society? I mean, that's something that Ben and I are talking about this hour. So your favorite films, your favorite novels, what do they tell you about the culture, the political environment that we live in? 651-227-6000, 800-242-2828.

I read that you had some trouble as a kid, as a juvenile, 13, 14 years old, and I want you to tell me about that in a minute. But I am interested in how that kind of informed your idea of being someone who was kind of apart from society's norms.

BEN PERCY: Sure. I ran into trouble with teachers, with the principals, with my parents, with the law when I was in middle school and ended up, due to shoplifting, fights, vandalism, everything else, essentially pushed out of a school district and into another. And during this time, I was reading, of all things, Stephen King's The Gunslinger, The Dark Tower series, and developed this weird sort of fascination with Roland of Gilead and thinking of him as almost like this-- an example of a knight, a proper way for a man to behave. And bizarrely enough, this was a formative text in my life--

SPEAKER 6: I've never-- I don't know the book. I've never read it.

BEN PERCY: Well, look, if I revisited it now, I might be embarrassed at the fact that I viewed it as a formative text. But at that time, Roland seemed like the ultimate man so that I was asking myself at times in my head, what would he do in certain situations? But I guess to tie this back to Redmond, there's this idea of being the other. There's this idea of being an outsider, which I guarantee you in some capacity, every single writer has that experience. If you had a great time in high school or middle school, you can't be a writer.

SPEAKER 6: What?

BEN PERCY: They always seem to be misfits on the outside looking in. And I completely transformed myself, I guess, to carry the werewolf metaphor even further during that time and became almost rigidly noble and bounced my grades up and became a straight-A student and kind of even an enforcer within this new school district.

SPEAKER 6: See, that's so interesting.

BEN PERCY: --other people on line.

SPEAKER 6: You could have gone-- you could have gone two ways there. You could have reveled in your rebellion and your outsiderness or you could have chosen the path that you chose. Why do you think you did?

BEN PERCY: I guess I just reached that juncture in my life where my father ripped up my credit card-- not my credit card, ripped up my report card and tossed it like confetti across the room where my mother, after I was tossed out of school again for fighting, wandered upstairs to her room weeping and I just sort of felt like a smear of human waste as a result of that and decided to change who I was.

SPEAKER 6: And decided to become, not just noble, you said, but the enforcer. What does that mean?

BEN PERCY: Just in terms of keeping other people on line as well.

SPEAKER 6: So what does that mean?

BEN PERCY: That means--

SPEAKER 6: It sounds rather ominous, Ben.

BEN PERCY: Knocking people against walls if they're misbehaving.

SPEAKER 6: That's what I thought. And did the school appreciate that?

BEN PERCY: My new school indeed did.

SPEAKER 6: Yeah, you transferred schools, right?

BEN PERCY: Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER 6: Was that kind of the moment when you decided that you--

BEN PERCY: That was the exact moment.

SPEAKER 6: You would be somebody different?

BEN PERCY: Yeah. Having leapt-- having leaped from school district to school district growing up because I moved around quite a bit, you always know that when you arrive, not only are you immediately targeted, but you have that opportunity to define yourself in those first few days. Which is, I guess you could say the situation of one of my characters in Redmond as well as he finds himself moving from California to Oregon to live with his estranged mother.

SPEAKER 6: Most kids do not have such a bright line of demarcation at that age, I think, to say, I have a choice. I'm going to be this, not that. It's a very unusual.

BEN PERCY: Well, I guess thanks to Stephen King, he sent me on this dark hoof-marked path.

SPEAKER 6: I like to talk to authors about that kind of moment of discovery that books were going to open a big world to you and you had that moment of, so this is what reading can do. This is how it can change my world or rock my world. You had that. Is that the book?

BEN PERCY: That is the book for me. That is, it's almost biblical in that way. But throughout my whole life, I'm always turning to literature for answers. It gives me the opportunity to travel to faraway places and to live thousands of lives that otherwise wouldn't be available to me. And too, it's the way that I continue to enhance my aesthetic and that I'm constantly reading across timelines, across cultural, across geographic, across sexual lines. And as a result, opening up all these chambers in my mind that otherwise would be locked.

SPEAKER 6: Otherwise would be locked. I mean, what do you mean when you say you read across timelines and--

BEN PERCY: Well, I mean, I read a book that was written 100 years ago and I read a book that was written now. I read a book written by someone from another political perspective or cultural perspective, or gender perspective or of different sexual orientation. All of those things contribute to your mind being rewired and that reading, like writing, is an act of empathy.

SPEAKER 6: How so?

BEN PERCY: In that it forces you to occupy all these different territories to see how other people think, to experience as best as you can with ink and paper some flesh and blood opportunity.

SPEAKER 6: Margaret Atwood is coming to join us for Talking Volumes this season. I think she's in her early 70s, which is extraordinary because she maintains this interest in the edge of technology and-- I mean, some of the things that you're saying that you're reading literature for, that stuff that kind of sits in our peripheral vision I guess that we remain uncomfortable about the stuff that we might not want to fully acknowledge. Have you read her? Do you read her?

BEN PERCY: She's one of my favorite writers.

SPEAKER 6: Is she?

BEN PERCY: And one of the things I love about her, in addition to her ability to be so brave politically in her work, is the way that she's neither fish nor fowl. You could call her literary or you could call her genre, and that her sentences are exquisite. Her characters are three-dimensional. She has these glowing metaphors and these muscular themes throughout her work, but stuff happens. You really want to know what happens next and turn those pages so swiftly they make a breeze on your face.

SPEAKER 6: That's kind of the balance, isn't it, to not get so immersed in, as you just put it, the glowing metaphors and the beauty of the language that stuff isn't happening.

BEN PERCY: Yeah. Michael Chabon talks about this a little bit in a book he edited called Thrilling Tales, that he is a board reader, that he is tired of all these plotless stories that end, as he puts it, sparkling with epiphanic dew. And so if you look at Margaret Atwood or if you look at Dennis Lehane or if you look at Kate Atkinson or if you look at Cormac McCarthy, I mean, what corner of the bookstore do they belong in? You could put them in crime, you could put them in thriller, you could put them in Sci-Fi. You could put them in horror. You could also put them in literature.

SPEAKER 6: I think-- part of this, I think, of the challenge for science fiction writers is not to become so mesmerized by the technology, the next world that you're describing, that there isn't some kind of, as you said, empathy, that the characters are not interesting enough, empathetic enough, dimensional enough to keep the reader caring about what happens to push the story.

BEN PERCY: And too, if you look at the worst of genre, it is relying too heavily upon formulas, upon previous tropes and archetypes, in addition to maybe critiques about pedestrian prose and one-dimensional characters. So the idea being that you need to reinvent those formulas in the way that maybe Sergio Leone did with his Man With No Name, Westerns. He's sort of tipping his hat to John Ford and then breaking those archetypes over his knee like a brittle bone and trying to say something different about the West, something different about the cowboy is like a rapacious ignoble presence instead of just a white hatted golden-hearted guy.

SPEAKER 6: But people kind of cling to those tropes, as you said, and those images that are familiar.

BEN PERCY: Sure. And--

SPEAKER 6: I mean--

BEN PERCY: The trick is tipping your hat, tipping your hat to it while at the same time making it your own-- making it your own 40 acres. So that's what Margaret Atwood is doing. If you look at Oryx and Crake or The Year of the Flood, she's tipping her hat to the post-apocalyptic narrative, the dystopian narrative while at the same time making it her own. And part of that is the environmental allegory at the heart of it and part of that is just the exquisite way that she puts together sentences and the characters who are so unforgettable.

SPEAKER 6: I mentioned-- I mean, you've done that as well, as we said at the beginning of the conversation, but I mentioned that people have become less than fearful, I guess, frightened by the image of the werewolf. They've become accessible, even cuddly in series like the Twilight series. Tell me how you thought about putting the fear back into that kind of a character but not in a caricaturing kind of way. So you know what I'm asking?

BEN PERCY: Right. Right. Yeah. Well, if you look at the Twilight franchise, these werewolves leap up into the air, kick their heels together and transform into the cuddly creatures you mentioned before.

SPEAKER 6: Right.

BEN PERCY: And I'm trying to make--

SPEAKER 6: And they're very attractive.

BEN PERCY: They're-- yeah, they're all studs. So my werewolves don't have six pack abs and they're not full moon.

SPEAKER 6: How do you know?

BEN PERCY: They're not full moon howlers either. They are a believable horror in that they are infected. And this infection for some of them is a curse and for others they view it as any outsider can choose to do. You can view it as a curse or you can view the thing that makes you different as a power. And in this way, I guess I draw parallels to my narrative more to X-Men than I do to the Twilight franchise.

SPEAKER 6: OK, but the X-Men kind of revel in their power, don't they?

BEN PERCY: As do some of my characters in that they view it as a way of life, as identity, as a pure way of living and that they are more tapped into that tooth and claw instinct that wants to find us.

SPEAKER 6: There is some ambivalence though, isn't there, here because there is a certain ostracization that goes on because of this.

BEN PERCY: Sure. And that's why some of them are pushed to extreme measures and trying to battle back against government crackdowns and societal prejudice in order to make themselves heard.

SPEAKER 6: How much were you thinking-- I read that Justin Cronin review of the book. And one of the things he said was the first 9/11 werewolf story. I mean, seriously how much were you thinking about the way we changed in those years right after 9/11?

BEN PERCY: Well, as I said, I'm writing about the culture of fear that we live in.

SPEAKER 6: Yeah.

BEN PERCY: But beyond that, I mean, this is a global novel and this is a novel with a lot of reverse engineering in it too because I'm not just writing about right now but I'm taking us through this larger timeline, this larger chronology and talking about the crusades and talking about westward expansionism, and talking about World War 2, and talking about the Civil Rights movement, and all the different occasions where people have been sort of pushed into a corner because they are viewed as different.

SPEAKER 6: I'm interested in the sense of the language that you have. Do you teach English literature? OK. So that's something that you're quite interested. At Saint Olaf, right?

BEN PERCY: Yes, correct.

SPEAKER 6: So it's interesting to me, there's a-- I thought there was kind of a staccato-- now I know now hearing the way you speak, this makes a little more sense. But there was kind of a staccato hard edge to the storytelling, to the language that you use. Now is that deliberate or is that this feels natural?

BEN PERCY: Well, over time, I guess, I've developed my own voice, but I'm also trying to vary my style as best I can in a craft move I call replication so that the style matches the content of the moment. And if I am writing about an avalanche, my sentences might grow larger and roaring. And if I'm writing about a train, there might be kind of a chunk chunk chunk style and the images in that moment might appear fragmented in the same way that you peer out a train window.

And if I'm writing about sex, I'm trying to do it in a slippery, silky sort of way so that Marvin Gaye is essentially played in the background. So this idea of I am making stylistic choices in a very strategic way, grammatical choices and rhetorical effects.

SPEAKER 6: This is interesting. Replication. I mean, this is just a style that you made up or that you've created yourself. I've never heard anybody talk about this that way.

BEN PERCY: I might have made up the term but I certainly didn't make up the move. Look at James Baldwin at the end of Sonny's Blues. The brothers are in this jazz club and one is in the audience, the other on the stage. And they finally come to this moment of understanding between the two of them. And while the one brother plays, the sentences take on slant rhyme, they expand and they contract. There's repetition. It sounds like jazz.

SPEAKER 6: Do you read your writing aloud to yourself or to anybody?

BEN PERCY: I do-- I do read it aloud when I'm in my basement dark room hammering away. And you can feel it through the floorboards above rumbling.

SPEAKER 6: What?

BEN PERCY: Yeah. I read away and you can just-- you catch things that sound off when you read it aloud in a way that you can't when you're reading silently. And I do a lot of performance, I guess you could say as well. I'm on the lecture circuit regularly so I'm visiting different festivals and conferences and colleges and universities, and standing up in front of people and rumbling--

SPEAKER 6: And doing what? Reading your own work or enhancing that with some kind of performance?

BEN PERCY: Well, I'll do the Ben Percy show and read my work. But I also typically do a craft lecture accompanying this.

SPEAKER 6: And what does that sound like?

BEN PERCY: Well, I might give a lecture, take the podium and talk about something like replication or modulation, modulation of emotion within a narrative, or I might talk about the borderlands of literary fiction and genre fiction. I've got a lot of stuff I-- a lot of rabbits I can pull out of my hat.

SPEAKER 6: So when you're-- let's say you're three or four chapters in on the novel. Are you pausing at the end of the chapter to then go down into that dark place in the basement and act this out in some ways to be able to hear the way the rhythm of the language sounds? Are you doing that?

BEN PERCY: Well, I typically start every day editing and I might be in editorial mode for two hours before I'm filling up white space again. And when I'm editing, I'm not just pushing sentences around but I'm reading passages aloud and testing the way that they sound. So eventually when I finally come to, not just the end of a chapter, but the end of a book when I strike that final period, I'm hopefully done so that it's the equivalent of a rock being continuously polished by a river over and over again.

SPEAKER 6: You had what I thought was a really great description of how you do this. I spend all day pushing words around in my head. Some sound like singing, some sound like screaming. When does it sound like screaming?

BEN PERCY: Well, I was talking about the modulation of emotion before and what you ideally want to do to terrify somebody is give them a tickle first and then slug them in the stomach so they're caught off-- so they're caught off-guard.

SPEAKER 6: You're one of the few writers we've ever had in the studio that I wish was in a different state. No, just kidding, Ben. But you are kind of scary.

BEN PERCY: Don't you feel sorry for my children?

SPEAKER 6: You have young children?

BEN PERCY: Me reading them bedtime stories.

SPEAKER 6: Yes, I do.

BEN PERCY: Goodnight Moon was a horror novel until you've heard me read it.

SPEAKER 6: How old are these poor long-suffering children?

BEN PERCY: I've got a four-year-old daughter and a seven-year-old boy.

SPEAKER 6: Oh my gosh. Do they like to read?

BEN PERCY: They're obsessive readers. Yeah, my son would read past midnight if he could. We have to go in and shut off the light. And he's written two novels of his own.

SPEAKER 6: Really?

BEN PERCY: One of them called Alien Rampage.

SPEAKER 6: The apple does not fall far from the tree.