In 2017, I read the novel Patricide, by D. Foy. It’s a brutal and challenging book, full of ungodly sorrow and heartbreak. It’s the kind of book you can’t read before bed because it’ll make sleep impossible. But it’s also a beautiful and tender piece of work. I was curious who would publish such a troubling and unwieldy tome in our current era of idling conformity. The answer is James Reich, the founder and editor of Stalking Horse Press.
In addition to running a publishing house, James is many other things: Englishman, vegan, novelist, essayist, journalist, punk rocker, and ecopsychologist. Shortly after reading Patricide, I learned that James lives in Santa Fe, NM, just an hour’s drive from where I grew up. Now, whenever I’m home, I make the trip out to see him, and we drink martinis and talk books. James is one of the most erudite people I’ve ever met, a man who’s penned a psychoanalytic monograph on the misunderstood psychologist Wilhelm Reich (no relation). You need further proof of his genius? James had the good sense to publish my latest, Pure Cosmos Club. Now, James has his own new novel, The Moth for the Star, coming out on September 12th, from 7.13 Books. It’s a metaphysical murder mystery set in depression-era New York City. I read the book in its entirety earlier this week over a redeye transatlantic flight. In fact, I’m still struggling with jet lag, but I’m eager to discuss the book with James, so here we go…
Matthew Binder: You’ve had your novels published by Counterpoint/Soft Skull, Anti-Oedipus, and now 7.13 Books. What was happening in the literary world in 2016 that inspired you to start Stalking Horse Press?
James Reich: It was 2015, really. The first books—D. Foy’s Patricide, Jason DeBoer’s Annihilation Songs, and Michael J. Wilson’s A Child of Storm—were published in 2016, but the work began the previous year, so next year, it’ll be 10 years of Stalking Horse. What I remember of the origin was that I had finished what I had thought might be a third novel for Soft Skull. That was Mistah Kurtz! A Prelude to Heart of Darkness. My original agent Will Lippincott had stepped away from the business, and Soft Skull didn’t want the book. In my mind, I thought the concept of a prelude to Conrad’s book was a serious and audacious—yes, commercial—prospect, and could be adopted for syllabi everywhere, etc. But no one agreed, except for D. Harlan Wilson at Anti-Oedipus. A couple of presses the agency approached simply refused to read it because Conrad was taboo.
And I saw what D. Harlan Wilson was doing with marginal and experimental literature at Anti-Oedipus Press and was inspired to finalize a plan that I’d had for a decade or more to start helping other writers who were writing interesting,forceful manuscripts that weren’t being recognized and published. That’s probably a common story, but it reflects shifts in technology and access for small press publishers. I recall being at AWP and a representative of a major publisher on a panel said, “We love small presses. You are the lifeblood of the industry. You take the risks…etcetera, etcetera.” The usual bullshit. I thought Fuck off! I hate being patronized. So, I walked out.
MB: In the past year, you’ve published a book of your own poems, written a non-fiction book, published three works of other people’s fiction on Stalking Horse Press, and now you have a new novel out. How the hell do you balance all these literary pursuits?
JR: I don’t, really! You know the tv series The Bear, where the cast spends 95% of the first season screaming at each other? It’s almost intolerable, but there’s brilliance underneath. It’s that, except there is literally no one else to shout at, except myself. No. In reality, I’m very independent, and I owe my life to literature, to writing, and to the introspective, existential act of creation or analysis. It’s not so much balancing the literary pursuits, as it is tolerating anything that tries to get in the way. That’s what I have trouble with.
MB: The Moth for the Star is set in Manhattan shortly after the big stock market crash of 1929 plunges the economy into depression. You write startling depictions of shanty towns, breadlines, and the overall suffering that plagues the impoverished masses. And yet the book’s main characters—Charles and Campbell—are living recklessly on the dwindling inheritance left to Campbell by her father. It’s captivating watching these characters witness the horrors of destitution and then do everything in their powers to expedite their own financial ruin. What is happening psychologically that allows people to be so willfully obtuse?
JR: Dopamine. That’s what Dr. Anna Lembke might say, in contemporary terms. What we discover over and over is the truth of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle—the relationship between pleasure and pain, and the ways in which that relationship becomes pathological. I’ve been reading Kent Dunnington’s book Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice after I heard Anna Lembke refer to it. One of its provocative turns of phrase is that “Addiction is in fact a kind of embodied cultural critique of modernity and the addict a kind of unwitting prophet.” There are 35 million canaries in the coalmine of modernity. So, one way to read The Moth for the Star is through the lens of addiction, through the bottom of a glass, darkly. That pain and pleasure share a spectral region of the brain explains to us why—and I believe this—tragedy is the highest form, why I find myself drawn to melancholy. I saw an interview with Damon Albarn recently, and he had a sticker on his piano that read “I [heart symbol] Melancholy.” I understand completely his need for it, for the beauty of melancholic states.
MB: Repressed memory is at the center of this murder mystery. I know you possess a deep interest in and are a true student of psychology. Which psychologists work influenced this novel?
JR: The Moth for the Star is premised on a few ideas, but one that is stated most explicitly in the book is Jung’s line from The Red Book: “Every attentive person knows their Hell, but not all know their devil.” Carl Jung was in a profound psychic crisis when he wrote The Red Book, as I’m sure you know. It’s a liminal text, a visionary Blakean document. What happened to Jung was what Stanislav Grof would call a spiritual emergency—simultaneous emergency and emergence. Jung was in his own kind of Hell, and Jung meant that Hell is easy to recognize, but the usher and tyrant may be less obvious. In general, I’m influenced by Freud, Wilhelm Reich—the subject of my forthcoming nonfiction you mentioned—Otto Rank, Sándor Ferenczi, and Jung, yes.
MB: Charles and Campbell begin spotting herons in New York City’s parks. And then, later, the heron plays an integral role in the novel’s plot. Does the heron possess a historic symbolic meaning that inspired you to employ the giant bird in your novel?
JR: Yes, the heron of Egyptian mythology, Bennu, an archetype of rebirth, of what is deathless and generative. But an archetype is a complex, so contains its reverse. Campbell’s initial recognition of the herons was one of the first things, the voicing I knew that character must have.
MB: I have to say that I was genuinely shocked by Moth’s ending. Did you know the ending all along or did it come to you late in the writing process?
JR: That’s great, thank you! I want the conclusion of the novel to disturb and unsettle the reader, including the way they’ve read everything that goes before. But to the question: I knew the ending almost immediately, after the opening paragraph. I knew who Charles Varnas was and who he and Campbell were to each other, and precisely what their crime must be. And I very much like Varnas and Campbell. Perhaps seeing them as animus and anima makes them sympathetic. But they are, although I hadn’t read it at the time I wrote the novel, like Dunnington’s “unwitting prophets,” which is their tragedy, the Trauerspiel I wanted to write.
MB: What’s next for you? Are you ready to take a break?
JR: I sent a contract to a grand American poet a couple of days ago, but I can’t say much about that yet. So, yeah, I’m putting together what will be published in the tenth year of Stalking Horse Press. That includes a follow-up by one of the first authors on the press, Kurt Baumeister who now works as an acquiring editor at 7.13 Books and who really understood The Moth for the Star. The next work of mine you’ll see is Wilhelm Reich versus The Flying Saucers from Punctum Books’ Brainstorm imprint in the spring. It’s not hagiography, but I wrote it with warm feelings toward Reich, and with my analysis of events toward the end of his life—another melancholy or tragic story. I’m certain that there will be misunderstandings that will bring me some scorn and bruises, but one invites that whenever one writes about audacious figures and with any audacity in the analysis. I think it’s a tender, compassionate book, heartbreaking in its own way, if an ‘academic’ or para-academic work can be, but we will see.
