The Making of The Pixies: An Introduction

First of all, I've got nothing but respect for the band Pixies. I wrote this book listening to their music. "Debaser" was something I returned to a lot, and its bass riff and chorus is pure joy; the guitar solo outro feels like the sound of something brilliant and new. It's pure anarchic chaos, but it's different and it's wonderful. I feel like this music definitely affected me and my personal life, which I was desperately trying to change, all the while writing this book. I do like more obscure Pixies songs like "Break my Body" with its title anguished cry; that was the darker side of how I felt writing this book and its desperate shriek is something I can imagine the title creatures -- the pixies -- saying.

The decision to have the title creatures speak -- instead of swimming about the air, all silent and sinister, like sharks of the sky -- was a goofy one, and I don't regret it. I've always disliked anything having a veneer of seriousness, and appropriateness, and so by having the pixies speak and make jokes, I was able to be true to the spirit of the band I was playing homage and to and also avoiding the stuffy, serious horror -- the pearl clutching stuff -- I've always endeavoured to avoid. When the pixies appear and make jokes, the characters are utterly terrified, but I hope the reader is entertained.

The desire to avoid an overly serious book is part of the reason why I set this in my prankster satirical (emphasis on satirical) German fairytale world, the one I used in In Bloom. I knew this would push buttons. This book grapples with the Nazi menace in a deliberate way that the former book did not, and I wanted the anti-fascist message to be completely clear. That is the reason why when Lily and Rudy mess around with black paint, it drips from the ceilings and gets everything; this nasty, dirty filthy stuff. The drip, drip of fascism is everywhere in this book, represented by the paint. The black paint, covering the gargoyles and splattering the castle, is a metaphor for how fascism destroyed the German fairytale of the nineteenth century and warped the country in a way that was quite frightening.

The Pixies is one of my darkest novels: about being trapped in castle with monstrous teenage boys and these ugly, even more monstrous Ancient Egyptian pixies. The armed thugs led by Gunther unleash an Ancient evil in their desire for power, and the book follows how the teenagers respond it. You have all these political ideas, some ugly, that were lurking about at the start of the twentieth century, and that is reflected in the discourse between the characters in the book.

Rudy Newman is one of my most terrifying characters and is, obviously, clearly a teenage Hitler. He's a painter, an obsessive oversensitive artist, and is only one step away from madness. That was a very dark idea I was toying with when writing the book; that every artist is only one step away from the greatest, the most drowning, evil. That's why the book terrifies me, personally. Of all the things in the book, jokes aside, I think I did take this seriously. The scene where Lily and Professor Gough venture into the Munich square painting and encounter the fascists is the thing I've written that terrifies me the most.