Second Chance Magic: Talking Bomb Island with Stephen Hundley https://ift.tt/n8DaWsG
Billed as a “funny and fast-paced Southern summer novel,” Bomb Island by Stephen Hundley drops in May 2024. With its gritty lyricism and feral plot, it joins the ranks of contemporary gems such as Sophia by Michael Bible and Teenager by Bud Smith. Hundley discusses Bomb Island’s origin and development in the conversation that follows.
Stephen Hundley is the author of The Aliens Will Come to Georgia First (University of North Georgia Press, 2023) and Bomb Island (Hub City Press, 2024). His stories and poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Cream City Review, Carve, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MA from Clemson, an MFA from the University of Mississippi, and is currently completing a PhD in English at Florida State University, where he is writing a book about the feral horses of Cumberland Island.
Let’s talk origins. Back in 2020, you published a short story called “Streets of Gold” about an existential diver who makes sub-aquatic pilgrimages to a bomb on the ocean floor. That piece expanded into a longer fiction called “Godbomb,” a standout from your 2023 collection The Aliens Will Come to Georgia First. Now here we are in 2024 with Bomb Island, which (as the title indicates) features yet another fictionalized sunken explosive. This bomb appears to be following you. Why is that?
That’s a deep cut! The bomb – the real one – is near Tybee, not far from where I grew up, and is part of the mythos of that area. I wrote “Streets of Gold” for Firewords, a UK magazine famous for illustrating its stories, so I wanted something with a strong, central image. The challenge I found was that the bomb itself – the steel case of it – was pretty inert, whereas the idea of the bomb was spectacular. The speaker in “Streets of Gold” builds the bomb into a kind of religious symbol, and it took on some grandeur that way, when juxtaposed with some ornate Christian iconography.
You reworked that theme for “Godbomb,” where communing with the bomb serves as an alternative to a character’s suicide. Again: the image is central but dormant. Again: a bomb haunts a loner.
In both cases, the characters’ mythology offers the emotional core, and the bomb operates a little like an idol or some such – it is the source of great potential power, but, as detritus, it is also a muted representative of grander things.
I think Whistle puts it nicely in the novel. “Being near power reveals us,” she says. “The bomb exposes what we want.” That’s the goal, right? Revelation via proximate threat? The end near (but not here)?
Absolutely. The tension between the unfulfilled promise of the bomb (the explosion) and its physicality (as a kind of “loaded” monument) is probably why the bomb took on the background role that it did in Bomb Island. The glass bottom boat tours of the bomb, the way the bomb contextualizes and normalizes danger in the characters’ lives, the way the bomb invites a consideration of radical change – all of these ideas surround the bomb and ultimately shade-out its relevance as a weapon. In a similar way that a religion might affect the characters, influencing their thoughts and actions subtly or even subconsciously, the bomb lurks in their minds.
The bomb lurks (religiously), but it’s also dangled (commercially). This is one of my favorite aspects of the novel – its exploration of the South’s tendency to commodify its mysticisms. For the “believers” in the book (e.g., Fish, Whistle, Nutzo), the bomb imbues their lives with a kind of spiritual power, and they respect it accordingly. But for the town of Royals, the bomb is a tourist trap: “On the billboards outside Royals a mushroom cloud swallowed a tiny cartoon town. Touch Death, the billboards said. Soon, suburban families were paying to ‘snorkel with the giant’ and ‘brush eternity.’” That’s a sharp critique, man. Here’s a question you must have considered a thousand times in the making of this book: what would have happened if you detonated the bomb?
When I first brought the project to Tom Franklin in Mississippi, he suggested I consider setting off the bomb, which would have transformed it from a symbol and philosophical tool. In some ways, having the bomb stay asleep breaks Chekhov’s gun and all that, but I felt the explosion would draw too much attention away from the characters and the story I had in mind (not to mention the tiger).
Tom’s first rate, but I think your instincts cracked open a stranger kind of story. It seems to me that some of the best philosophy in the novel gathers around the bomb’s non-exploding. As one character puts it, “When it [the bomb] was made, it was the single most powerful thing on the planet. Made to destroy capital cities in a second. Made to kill millions. But it refused. Look at it. It isn’t damaged. It isn’t sleeping, only resting on the sand. It could kill us all, but it won’t.” I love explosions as much as the next pudgy academic, but you work the inertia to great effect. Also, even with an unfired Chekhov’s gun, this novel isn’t starved for violence. You’ve got fist-fights, tiger attacks, and a heart-pounding final showdown that reads like a scene from Apocalypse Now. Can you talk a bit about the role of violence in this book, especially as it relates to Fish’s emerging notions of masculinity?
For Fish, who was raised by rebellious types and is surrounded by regular acts of violence, the role of reprisal and the appropriate use of force seemed a natural question. The benefit of all characters in fiction, but young characters especially, is that they are willing (as willing as we will them to be) to try any solution. We see them fail. We see them learn. We see them try again.
They try again despite being surrounded by personal and historical failures. They try, per Whistle, with a belief in “second chance magic.” That’s one of the most apparent strengths of Bomb Island – the way you give Fish space to keep trying (and keep failing) in the face of much hate and rejection. The change we see by the end of the novel feels earned.
If you’re writing an outsider, the question of how that character deals with hate or rejection appears readily. I did not set out to write a parable or to provide any morals, but I did want to demonstrate growth in this story. As I transitioned from writing, primarily, short stories to writing novels, the ability to stay with a character for longer – to grow with them – was one of the main appeals.
Let’s map the influences that shaped the novel. I’m detecting a bit of Michael Bible.
One thing that Bible’s books taught me – talking Sophia and Empire of Light here – was how I might write female characters that were devastatingly cool to my male protagonist without them falling into some kind of “manic pixie dream girl” trope. All of Bible’s women are fully human, and that’s what I wanted for Celia – Bomb Island’s female lead.
It baffles me that more serious readers don’t know Bible’s stuff. Especially Sophia. Is he like the literary equivalent of the band that’s too brilliant for anything other than obscurity?
He’s the literary equivalent of the holy ghost, in my opinion. Sophia has influenced my idea of the novel tremendously. I read it – and listened to it – several times while drafting Bomb Island.
Back to Celia, though. She definitely transcends all the young heroine tropes, not only because she’s immediately ambiguous, but also because she’s inherently elusive. She’s got “Noli me tangere” (“Do not touch me”) tattooed across her leg, which seems a perfect encapsulation of her ferocious agency and commitment to outsider culture. In some ways, Celia’s more dangerous than the tiger and the bomb combined, wouldn’t you say?
As an exemplar of strength and self-actualization, Celia is very dangerous to Fish’s status quo on the island. As different as she and Fish are in terms of emotional maturity and lifestyle, they’re both artists. Really, this is the first artist that Fish meets. More than awkward, quasi-romantic fumbling, I wanted the exchange of art and the joy of art to be the foundation of their relationship.
Speaking of art, can we talk about the map that appears in the front of the book? It’s a jaw-dropping piece, and it perfectly captures the spirit of the story. How did Hub City pull that off?
The map was the press’s idea, and it may be my favorite part of the book. It was designed and illustrated by my partner, who is a multi-talented visual artist. I made her a reference sketch, but to achieve the specificity she wanted for the project, she read through the novel and took notes on the important places, the set pieces and scenes, and the spaces between them. She studied maps of Cumberland Island, St. Catherines Island, Ossabaw – all places with a lot of significance to me, that taught me what the world of the novel feels like.
Your partner sounds remarkable, and her map made for a wonderful companion. The action picks up so quickly, especially in those final chapters, which means you’re constantly flipping back to the map to locate yourself in relation to the characters’ movement.
That was the idea. When I read a book with a map – The Lord of the Rings or A Wizard of Earthsea – I consult it obsessively. I love visualizing the scale of the world (in Bomb Island’s case, a relatively small scale) and the physicality of the setting.
It’s a book that needs a map because it’s a book that’s so invested in geography. What did Ron Rash say? “Geography is identity.” I think Bomb Island both confirms and complicates this theory, especially in a character like Fish, who is as shaped by people (particularly Whistle) as he is by place. How do you see this story in connection with Ron’s idea?
This is an idea that has given me the run-around for years – how connected a person is to place, even to homeplace. I hope you’ll indulge me while I feel around for clarity. When I started this novel, I believed connection to place to be as Rash puts it – essential – though now, I’m not so sure. People and characters seem to me, more and more, as messy amalgams, rather than clear reflections, of place. Places themselves – especially those with elements of the wild – seem more complicated to me now than they did years ago. If there’s an answer to this question of connection, I think we are more likely to find it in an anthropology textbook than a novel.
The characters in Bomb Island –they’re almost all transplants, right? They abandoned their old lives (and possibly their old selves), and they fled to the island expecting a kind of transformation.
Yeah, most of them are from Atlanta. They came to the island looking for a new start or a new level of independence. Fish, as a child, is inherently porous and absorbs the ideology of Whistle and the other adults in his life. His family are considered outliers, outcasts, and weirdos, and Fish takes that on – developing a kind of chip on his shoulder. Fish and his family are quite at home on the island, the necessarily isolated geography of which provides a natural distance between themselves and the mainlanders. The otherness of the place is reflected in the ostracization of the family, and this is true for the mystery, mysticism, and ruggedness of the island as well.
Your narrator (on outliers): “No one was from Royals. It seemed that people only fell there from some other, higher place.” Everyone in this book is an exile, but Fish and his people have decided to be exiles together. It’s as if they’re trying to construct (rather than return to) some notion of “home.”
More than it is a story about island people, low-country people, Southern people, or Americans, Bomb Island is a story about misfits and survivors clinging to one another, pushing one another, and living wherever and however they can while maintaining and chasing a unique identity.
Your characters tend to be paradoxes. Hell, this book is a paradox. On the one hand, it’s incredibly compressed and, because of the momentous plot, I imagine most folks will devour it in a day or two. In this sense, Kirkus was right to call it “a taut novel.” On the other hand, though, it feels wildly ambitious and brimming with the energy we associate with the best coming-of-age stories. In this sense, it feels full. Spilling over, actually. Like you took everything you love – wildlife and utopias and tattoos – and stuffed it all into this one miracle of a book. What’s the secret?
I think it was my professor at Clemson, the writer Nic Brown (Bang Bang Crash), who told me that my novel – anyone’s novel – would be like that: taking on everything you care about. I was very interested in how inevitable (and freeing) Nic made this process sound. Like my personal fascinations would be the bread and body of the novel no matter what I thought I was writing about. This process makes time capsules of our work.
As the great sage of Bomb Island puts it: “We cannot hide from what hunts us. We have to meet it.” Well, before we wrap up, I want to get your take on medium. I keep hearing that the novel is dead, or that it’s almost dead, or that it will be dead as soon as the right bomb detonates. I can’t speak for the field as a whole, but there’s nothing necrotic about a book like Bomb Island. This book’s more poetic than most poetry collections I know, and its power-to-weight ratio is punching right up there with the best short fiction. Even still, was it a foregone conclusion that this book would become a novel, or did you entertain other constructions?
That’s a great question. I wrote this novel while in the midst of trying to pitch and sell a story collection, and, often, I seemed to be selling beets at the strawberry festival. You know what I mean? The agents seemed to want something sweet, cohesive, and cinematic, and I was offering them something that was tough, fragmented, and heavily textured. As a young writer, I wanted the next book I wrote to be something that would be easier to say “yes” to. I also wanted to participate in the tradition of the form. I figured my voice and sensibilities would translate to whatever shape of text I chose, so I didn’t look to complicate the form. I was fixated on telling a story with tension and clarity. And as for the death of the novel, I’m drafting my second one now, and it feels alive to me!
Well if it’s even half as brilliant as Bomb Island, it’ll be a killer. Congratulations on the book, and thanks for the conversation.
Thank you, Dan!
FICTION Bomb Island
By Stephen Hundley
Hub City
Published May 7, 2024
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