They're very upfront about the types of stories they're telling, and you take a lot of opportunities to play with that. That's the place where the novel ought to be today, I think, a somewhat self-conscious place, and the novel should use the advantages it has over other media. Even serious literary fictions. One of the great things about the power of the novel is that it can inhabite all these ambiguous states that, if it were any visual or auditory medium, would have to be made clear. In the novel that I'm working on, I'm toying with a narrator idea that I pretty much stole from Madame Bovary , which begins in the plural first person.
Few people remember that the story actually begins from somebody's point of view.
Most novels usually have an omniscient narrator with such a strong, stylized voice that you wonder who it is, or a first person narrator who's absolutely infallible, able to trace every single step of his or her internal processes. I'm frustrated by the ineptitude of narration. Despite the absurdist elements of Watch Your Mouth , your scary scenes are also genuinely terrifying. Yeah, I like scary things. I was interested in finding ways to do dark comedy that were actually dark and comic.