Finding Comfort in Darkness: A Talk with Bradford Tatum, Author of Only the Dead Know Burbank and LO
Bradford Tatum opens up about the painful journey of the artist, the joys of the vampire, and the experience of becoming that crazy old white dude who chats to himself.
The mainstream media has often treated multi-hyphenates like second class citizens. There is an ugly stigma surrounding artists who attempt to branch out into other mediums, as if a creator's ability to work in multiple disciplines is somehow unfair and must be treated with bitter consternation or, at best, bemused dismissal. The term 'vanity project' is thrown around quite liberally and was undoubtedly coined by some bitter film critic or jealous hanger-on. How else to belittle their betters whose varied accomplishments they view as a slap in the face with a fine silken glove?
You'll notice the sarcastic affect of talk show hosts when they speak to a celebrated actor or pop star about their poetry collection, picture book, or full-fledged novel. This despite historical evidence of “that comedy guy” (Steve Martin, John Waters, the list goes on) writing unforgettable essay collections, “that hip hopper” turning in emotionally complex acting turns (the late Tupac Shakur in films like Gridlock'd, the entrepreneur 50 Cent mining his own tumultuous upbringing for a thinly veiled biopic), or “that Hollywood movie star” (Billy Bob Thornton, Kevin Bacon, Zooey Deschanel, and so forth) making beautiful music.
Envy is a chameleonic monster that takes many shapes, but for all the malignant ink that's been vomited onto the page or screen in the name of sheer jealousy, two things remain undeniable: Envy may bark and bite, but it is one monster that's incapable of devouring its prey. And genius is a many-tentacled creature that can take shapes that would never occur to the mediocre Envy monster.
Bradford Tatum is one of those many-tentacled creatures we refer to as a multi-hyphenate. He is an actor, a director, and a natural born writer. He has appeared in nearly 50 films and television programs, including Charmed, Criminal Minds, Lie to Me, Melrose Place, The Mentalist, and Westworld, as well as the cult films Down Periscope and The Stoned Age. He has also helmed 36 episodes of short-form television and two feature films (Standing on Fishes and Salt).
More recently, he has revealed a talent that might seem unlikely to anyone who doesn't know him. Over the last six years, he has released two hard-hitting novels that marry the lush prose of the literary novel to the oft-prescient themes of speculative fiction. And lo and behold, Tatum's writing is every bit as powerful as his thespianism.
Bradford Tatum the author is an artist of impeccable instincts, one whose sprawling works of prose play with familiar subject matter (immortality, vampirism, interplanetary travel, genetic manipulation) in new ways, and with a devotion to language that borders on narratophilia. His imagistic razzmatazz suggests a true visionary, which may explain why the critics have seemed so reticent to talk with him. After all, our culture seems to place more value on trends and stunts than it does on Bonafide art.
After learning that one of my favorite actors had released a novel honoring the golden age of the creature feature, I wasted no time in seeking out interviews like the one you are about to read (if I ever dispense with all of my blathering). All I found were two podcasts, one of which kept glitching as I tried to play it. This made no sense! Here was a hot new horror novel penned by a celebrated actor-director, which was released by Big Five publisher HarperCollins, and there was barely any media coverage to speak of.
The novel, Only the Dead Know Burbank, is a multigenerational epic of the macabre, which begins in the gelid hinterlands of post-World War I Germany, only to arrive quite briskly at the birth of Expressionist cinema and, finally, that glitzy mirage we call Hollywood, with its fake tans and false promises. Without spoiling the plot, 'Only the Dead' concerns itself with the creation of our most beloved monsters, from Dracula and Frankenstein to the Phantom of the Opera. It also concerns itself with the creation of a little woman throughout the crumbling epochs of civilization.
There is a truly graphic scene early into the first third of Only the Dead Know Burbank, in which the little girl at the center of the novel witnesses her mother's orgy with a train car full of young Austrian soldiers. This child, who has already bore witness to all sorts of darkness and depravity, is not simply privy to her mother's debauchery. Rather, she is confronted by her mother's brusque acceptance of her situation.
The way in which her mother ushers her into the train car after the soldiers have dismounted tells us that she expects her child to accept the situation as she has. The scene functions as a rite of passage for Maddy, the book's adolescent heroine, and it sets the tone for what will follow.
The novel's author offers some clarity on this scene when we finally speak.
“It's the beginning of making friends with the darkness that surrounds her—the quotidian grit that forms the pearl of longing and beauty, which hopefully the world will appreciate. Maddy's journey is the artist's journey. That was the spine of the thing for me.”
Tatum discovered a fondness for the dark side at a time in his life that many of us can relate to. It was that period in early pubescence when the lies of boyhood dissolve like acid and families begin to let the veil slip.
“You learn to love what surrounds you,” he tells me. “And for a young me that was being in the throes of my parents' extremely contentious and, at times, violent divorce. When most guys my age were playing with G.I. Joes and watching The A-Team, I was reading Poe and building monster models, and wishing it rained more in Southern California.
“Night Gallery was one of my dad's favorite shows, so if I wanted to spend some quiet time with him, I had to shiver through that. Eventually, you find a comfort in the darkness, and the old Universal horrors provided that comfort.”
It was that old school horror that would become a linchpin in Tatum's decision to write his first horror novel. While filming scenes for the television series SeaQuest, Tatum realized that the cast and crew were working on a submarine set that was built on the same stage where 1925's Phantom of the Opera filmed its opera house sequences... and the opera house was still standing at the start of the show's production.
He describes the rare opportunity to stand on such a site in terms that could describe the novel itself: “Magical, tilted, anachronistic wonderland—here is the extremely high tech, futuristic submarine set complete with moon pool and mechanical dolphin surrounded by all this dusty and tarnished Belle Epoque glamour. I loved it!”
The novel this slice of celluloid history produced is nothing short of rapturous in its tribute to the golden age of the monster movie. It also happens to be a rough story, with some truly brutal and heart-rending turns.
At first blush, Only the Dead Know Burbank's existential horror appears like it could only have been conjured by a deeply tormented soul, such as Gogol or Ligotti. Strangely, this does not appear to be the case with its charismatic creator. In fact, I would go so far as to call its literary architect an optimist.
Modern authors are, in the main, a bunch of sour, dismissive misanthropes, who are nevertheless predisposed to behaving like supercilious cunts. My history with such commonplace waspishness makes the experience of speaking with someone like Bradford Tatum feel like a lung's worth of clean mountain air after an Aeon of wallowing in a literary toilet. Here is a man who has taken home a multitude of awards and grants for both his writing and his filmmaking, and the very first words we exchange make clear the kind of modest, engaged, and optimistic soul I am dealing with.
“Humbled beyond belief,” he writes after reading my review of 'Only the Dead' on Instagram. And when I ask him about the fate of the human race as it pertains to the dystopian Martian colony of his new novel, LO, he says, “Carbon-based life has already survived two massive extinction events. The fact that we are here at all speaks to a resilience that frankly scoffs at our social cohesion strategies of carefully curated Chicken Little-ism.
“Artists are innocent—they have to have the courage of their innocence to create—so, yes, I am hopeful. More than hopeful, I am engaged, delighted, passionate, terrified, humbled, and unbelievably excited to see what happens next.”
Naturally, my miserable ass hates him for it (kidding...or am I?). How dare he be so charming and positive about the human comedy! But Bradford Tatum wouldn't be Bradford Tatum without the wolfish charm, piercing attentiveness, and naked curiosity that colored our talk. It was these unmistakable traits that first drew me to his work as an actor, and it was these same attributes which held my attention until the fateful day when I came across his second novel, Only the Dead Know Burbank. That's when the little boy in me became truly jelly.
Only the Dead Know Burbank is a towering work of dark fairy tale writing, one that could conceivably stand alongside those vicious stories by the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersson, and other historical perverts of the night. The real kick in the ass? I almost didn't read it. Why? Because publishers suck.
As I said to its author during our Q&A, I discovered his novel on social media. “I remember seeing sponsored ads for it on Facebook or Instagram,” I said. “And it popped up in my feed a lot. This seemed to make perfect sense since it's aligned with my interests and the kinds of things I post about, but I was shocked to learn that HarperCollins was the publisher, particularly given the dearth of press it received.”
I asked if he was satisfied with how HarperCollins handled the book's release.
“I paid for all those ads!” Tatum exclaimed. “For over a year, I did that and was fairly successful in resurrecting some sort of interest in it. Big publishers give you less than two months to hit. In the case of 'Burbank,' they did no social media for it, hoping 'word of mouth' and good reviews would spark the flame. Didn't quite work out that way, which is ultimately my fault.
“No matter who publishes you, you have to be ridiculously proactive and aggressive in your self-marketing. I was green as grass when I got the deal—had no Instagram, no Facebook page—and I was just waiting to fail, while I basked in the supposed glory of being commercially published.”
Despite years of on-screen and behind-the-scenes experience as an actor, writer, and director, including his time as a staff writer under Dick Wolf for television's Deadline, the California native had to cold query agents for six years before landing an agent, a period he refers to as a truly dark and depressing time.
“The book was picked up three months after I signed with an agent—just a massive fluke, really. We didn't even submit to Harper for publication. My agent, who has since dropped me, knew a guy over there who was willing to read it, so he could settle a plot point we disagreed on. But the Harper thing was huge for me, really a high point, regardless of my ignorance and whatever purported laxity on their part. I am nothing but grateful to them for taking a chance with me.”
Tatum's experience with HarperCollins is something more indie authors should be aware of. One could view it as evidence that the grass is not always greener on the other side of the fence, but there is a larger lesson to be taken here. Rather than stew in a barrel of sour grapes, Bradford Tatum has opted to focus on the positives of his time with HarperCollins. It is a perspective that is strangely meditative for someone who's spent the better part of his life in an industry notorious for its grudges.
Typical Bradford Tatum, being charming and nice, even in the face of what sounds like something of a raw deal. But then, what else can we expect from a guy whose darkest work was inspired, in part, by a stroll through Central Park with his 10-year-old daughter, and the spooky history he made up on the fly for his little girl's amusement on their trip through New York.
For those who haven't read it, here's what you can expect from Only the Dead Know Burbank: a bloody, magical ballroom banquet of bacchanalia, pathos, old school macabre delights, and spine-tingling surprises. More importantly, you will find prose of the most immaculate order, words strung together like charms on a meticulously crafted carcanet. Recently, I reviewed the book, calling it “an intricately woven tribute to old Hollywoodland and the ancient world on whose bones it was built.” This description does a piss-poor job of representing the power of the artist's work.
In short, Bradford Tatum can do it all – act circles around his peers, write speculative fiction that could put the rest of us out of business (if, indeed, such a business offered any tangible monetary gains), and hold a jaded person such as myself in his sway, whether in conversation or in the pages of his latest book. Before I become this cat's full-time zombie in the classic Bela Lugosi sense of the word, I should probably mention that he has a new novel out entitled LO, from the enigmatic publishing house Soft Moon Press.
LO can be summed up as a sci-fi thriller, but that's like saying William Friedkin's Cruising is about patent leather or The Rocky Horror Picture Show is about how to entertain dinner guests. What LO really is eludes my meager vocabulary, which is why I asked its author here to talk about it. Before we could address the subject at hand, we discovered that we shared a long-nurtured love of the dark.
B. and I are veteran vampires. Both of us have toiled from dusk till dawn in the name of indie film, he on the legendary cult coming-of-age comedy, The Stoned Age, and me on the mercifully underseen Troma bloodsucker, Hemo. Remarkably, we are both able to look back on these innocent periods of all-nighters with fondness, but only one of us probably should.
When I asked him what he remembered most about the experience of working on the 1994 Trimark Pictures film, Tatum told me that it was the found family of its cast and crew that he remembered most about his time on the project.
“I loved doing The Stoned Age, mostly because of Michael Kopelow (Joe) and Michael Wiseman (Crump's Brother), who were both so much more than they seemed in that movie. The whole film was shot in the middle of the night. Literally, between the hours of sundown to just shy of sunrise, we were a tight little vampire family. Jim [Melkonian, director] let us play, it was absolute play. Very little pressure. A real joy.”
This heartfelt response was a far cry from what one would expect from his 'Stoned Age' character Hubbs, the long-haired, leather clad picture of fake-it-till-you-make-it coolness at the center of the Schnapps-swilling buddy comedy. This heartfelt candor speaks to Tatum's talent as a creator. In real life, as in his fictional forays, the artist presents a many-faceted nature that makes it impossible not to connect with him and his characters.
You know the guy is on to something when he plays a big rig driving serial murderer on Criminal Minds and your heart breaks for the fictional monster and his daughter, but that's one of the magnificent illusions Tatum conjures, just as the “cook” of his new novel conjures illusions of sight, smell, and taste.
When asked about the impetus behind LO – a story about a “build” who is learning about the world he was engineered for by Cook, a mixologist of all that humans find sublime – Tatum answers in his characteristically humble yet considered way.
“My first job at 16 was working the counter at the Mountain View, California McDonald's,” he says. “This was ages before Google, before the whole dot com disruption. My dad worked in computers, though, and I knew that early Silicone Valley world—hanging out in Palo Alto, smoking cloves after a screening of Zardoz in front of the New Varsity Theatre, talking about C++ with guys from my math class, and not understanding a thing.
“I always guessed the future would be flesh... never understood why AI held the allure it did, especially after the world had heard H.A.L.'s psychotic rendition of “Daisy” in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The trans humanist movement, the whole H+ thing, seemed queasier but far more practical to me. Then I started reading Jarod Lanier and really related to his fear that we were becoming more like our negative biased social media algorithms than the other way around. Where was the humanity? Where was the beating ethical baseline? So, all those things were in the mix; it's Shelley's Frankenstein, classic Presumption I guess in the age of socio-political cults. LO might be my version of that with a far more optimistic ending.”
There is an incredible scene about two thirds into the novel where a character is given a rare opportunity to free himself from the ties that bind, as it were, and he foregoes this opportunity. It is a poignant moment that begged for some clarification from its creator.
“Can you talk about the significance of this scene?” I asked Tatum.
“Trust,” he said. “That scene is about trust.”
The same scene discusses the careful orchestration of a phony simulacra of aged wooden floorboards, which underscores the artificiality of colony life as it is. I asked my generous interview subject if he sought to comment on any particular aspects of the present when imagining his futuristic simulacra.
“Yes,” he agreed. “Critical theory puts lived experience on par with accumulated data, perhaps trumping data in certain social constructs. What is real? What we remember? Or real time stimulus? [British neuroscientist] Anil Seth seems to think it's 90+ percent what we remember. So, it was a riff on that.”
Even though it's a definite sci-fi nightmare of sorts, there are touches of satire in LO that make it really fun to read, particularly the notion of foul human elites with their augmented pseudo-children representing something of a status symbol akin to owning the fastest car or marrying the youngest trophy wife.
“Did you mean for there to be some levity to the material?” I ask. “And was that kind of a juggling act?”
“The truest things about us are somehow the funniest, the most ironic,” Tatum insists. “So, yes, the humor was intentional.”
Despite the rapier wit deployed in his descriptions of the Willoughby Colony's privileged humans and their seemingly interchangeable “skins,” the humor does not distract from the weight of the novel's true themes. Tatum is relentless in his elucidations of the ephemera of life in this uncanny future, a world where everything is 3D printed and lacks the true essence of the past. I tell him that he has an unparalleled talent for piling it on.
“By page 12, you've already taken us on a tour that's hideous and hilarious and unsettling and terribly compelling, and you've done it in such an unabated fashion that the reader can't stop reading, because the reader really needs the answer to the question: 'Can he really sustain this energy and this imagery, or has he blown his entire wad right off the bat?' To our pleasant surprise, your narrator keeps grinding it out like some sort of marathon magician.”
I ask him if this was a gift he had to carefully hone for some time or if he was always the cat telling the campfire stories with friends.
“That came stock,” Tatum assures me. “I've always been like that, much to the chagrin of several girlfriends who could not get me to shut up once I got on a jag. I talk to myself now. Seriously. I'm that crazy old white dude who walks his neighborhood without the pretense of ear buds and literally chats to himself as he works out his little stories.”
The notion of a child of the 90s jogging in place to check their Fit Bit and catching sight of Powder's John Box lumbering along, raving to himself about hideous phantasms and abortions of geneticism, tickles me to no end.
Amused reveries notwithstanding, I remain struck by the Godmother app that serves as the novel's catalyst. I ask the wolfish wordsmith about the scientific mecca at the heart of LO and whether it grew out of any real-world paradigms.
“The practical applications of the Godmother app reminded me a bit of the Zeitgeist Movement and Jacques Fresco's notion of a resource-based economic society,” I tell him. “Did any of Fresco's theories or aphorisms influence this particular element of LO?”
“You got it!” Tatum exclaims. “I love Fresco! So did Walt Disney, apparently—he based EPOC on his theories...Hyperobjects. The true disruptions of global warming that Timothy Morton talks about can only unify us once we face that from the core of our shared humanity. Everything else will pale when that finally occurs. Descent through modification has made us reactive creatures; crisis managers, ultimately, not the writers of our destiny that we wish we were. Perhaps it does not matter what happened to us. It only matters who we are when it happens.”
The cunning architect responsible for LO's colony is a gentleman named Yakamura who struck me as something of a cross between Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, with the requisite dash of Elon Musk for flair. I ask Bradford if he could talk a bit about how this colony came to be and why Yakamura would create such a place.
“Do you build a better hammer?” he asks. “Or do you build a better carpenter who wields that hammer? Yakamura is the latter. Cook's mom was the former. And I'd hate to spoil Carlos Yakamura's true purpose for the colony, but the colony exists because the elite will always seek a place where the rules can be bent in their favor, where their arrogance and privilege might make them vulnerable to what they never see coming.”
Tatum describes the Godmother app of his novel as a search engine for one's life. “Algorithmic equity brought to you by massive data and a snarky bio-interface,” he explains. “Market-driven Marxism? Scarily enough, I think people would leap at that.”
On the subject of the title's namesake and central build, Tatum calls him “unlimited potential desperately in need of the lessons of lived experience—a waking, breathing, infinitely adaptable example of how badly we all need one another. How we need to listen to one another. Lo is love.”
On the more Frankenstein's monster aspect of his subject, Tatum says, “Lo is purely human, but modified by proprietary gene splicing, so a 'product' in name only. Lo is what happens when the self-serving nature of supply side economics is nurtured into an awareness that supersedes its intended function. Life—human life, in this case—always finds a way, finds balance, when loved and cared for and guided.”
It is this guidance and nurturing that operates as the sci-fi novel's fulcrum, a burden and blessing that falls squarely on the shoulders of Cook, a character from a questionable lineage, who guides us through the world of LO in a voice as passionate as it is weary.
There's a full-blooded sensuality to Tatum's writing, which seems to be largely absent from today's fiction. I think the lazy analogy would be Barkeresque, but there's definitely some of that Pino noir sensuality in his writing. After I first unearthed Grey Matters, Tatum's “fictional dialogues for the real world” (a collection of stories and fragments commissioned by a college professor for her business ethics class), I remember it evoking a certain verbiage that I hadn't seen in quite some time. Reminiscent of the feverish writings of libertine John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Tatum's style seemed to possess something distinctly Romantic in an age of ironic post-modernism.
Throughout the course of our exchange, Tatum acknowledged his enormous affinity for the Romantic tradition. As he put it, “What damaged adolescent doesn't?”
“Words are musical to me, lyrical and evocative, and so how something is stated is really paramount in my process—the feeling and flow of a sentence, like moving water under an ice floe of plot.”
Glacial similes aside, there is a fire to Bradford Tatum's writing – a propulsive prose poetry which blazes on the page like hungry flames licking blackened Redwoods – that transcends literary traditions or genres. Unsurprisingly, Tatum says he owes a greater debt to the great American songbook than he does to any single novel or author.
“I get a lot of my inspiration from songwriters,” he says, naming Cole Porter, Richard Rogers, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Elvis Costello among his forerunners. In his words, these artists are right up there with James Agee or John Cheever.
“Other than Shelley and Poe, the only other dark fiction that really got me was Patrick Suskind's Perfume,” he tells me. “I only wish I could read it in the original German.”
It is at this point that I ask the cultured artist that most pedestrian of stock questions: what is your process?
“As a writer, I know what my approach is,” I offer in the way of a beg-my-pardon. “But I'm constantly curious to hear about the techniques and rituals of others, perhaps in an attempt to augment my own.”
“Coup de foudre,” Tatum says. “[That is what] the French call it. Falling in love like a strike of lightning. I'm old-fashioned that way, I wait until I get hit with something—some splinter in the mind that sticks in there until I can make sense of it. Then comes the first sentence—then I listen—write down what I hear—work it—rework it—again and again. It's the only way home that I know, a stroll in a strange city. Destination unknown, as [Anthony] Bourdain was fond of saying.”
I ask if there are any lessons that he learned from his film career, which he took with him when he embarked on his literary endeavors.
“In what ways would you say your acting and directorial background has informed your writing?”
“Be specific,” he insists. “Always have a 'doing' and an emotional preparation and be willing to drop your preparation once you get hit with that first moment.”
I ask if his intuitive approach to novel writing ever results in dead ends and how he finds his way out of such a block.
“Oddly never, never stuck,” Tatum assures me. “When I feel like that's it for the day, that's all the communication I am going to get, I stop. My dad was a primo A-list bullshitter and I think I have more than a bit of that.”
“The words of the cook's mother resonated with me,” I tell him. “Particularly the part about 'the death of the free will.' Because all of this seems to very much be the course we are currently on. We share more and more of ourselves online, and thoughtlessly agree to software updates, without asking if there's a catch. Would you agree that we're already taking on the shape of a futurist dystopia?”
“Probably,” Tatum suggests, but he is quick to stress that none of this is inevitable. “We seem to be willing to do anything for social cohesion—believe anything from the echo chambers of our humid little information silos. This is ultimately untenable. But there will be bumps. There will be blood. But I have a daughter—I look into the face of the future every morning. The sun still rises and sets there.”
“What do you wish readers to take away from their experience with LO?”
“Hope,” Tatum says. “We will make it. We are worth the journey.”
Bradford Tatum's LO is also worth the journey. You can start that journey here.
This writing is awful.