On Influence

some thoughts

My book Becoming is out for sale, which is very cool. And it has got me thinking a lot about my influences. Admittedly, most of my influences are not literary, they’re musical. Though, there are a few books that have fundamentally changed how I see literature and there are many more musicians that have led me to discovering those books.

When I was about ten, I used to listen to wear the proverbial grooves off of my parents’s CDs so that I could know every element of texture in each album. This really taught me how to listen to music.

I became obsessed with Metallica for a minute specifically, but because I learned that their songs contained clues to find other forms of media. This is also why I am so tremendously grateful for the internet. Little baby me trying to unpack lyrics alone would have resulted in not much gained. But because I could scour the internet for hours and hours and learn about this or that, I was able to discover Dalton Trumbo. Yes, I am talking about One, no I didn’t play Guitar Hero until I was in my early twenties. Johnny Got His Gun is book, movie and song. And I wouldn’t know them all without Metallica. I also have them to thank for my favorite Hemmingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls. My favorite joke with my brother growing up was that we should get together and “Watch For Whom the Bell Tolls, while listening to For Whom The Bell Tolls, while reading For Whom The Bell Tolls (Hemmingway), while reading For Whom The Bell Tolls (which is a segment of Donne’s greater works of meditations that I forced myself to read when I was 14).” It’s not that funny, but it’s a specific Garcia (Ross / Henatay) brand of humor. This one song also gave me the opportunity to be a pretentious little shit by the ripe old age of twelve. I’d read all these adult tomes and dabbled in all these adult themes, and now I could flex on my friends. But it wasn’t in order to flex on my friends that I did all this digging; the music made me curious. Nothing more, nothing less.

I am the cat curiosity is trying to kill.

Once upon a time, well before my first concert, my favorite band was Rush. Once upon a time they did a tour for an album called Vapor Trails. My parents and my brother went, but I was “too young”. You can imagine the fit I threw staying home with a babysitter. I was like eight though, and in retrospect, I shouldn’t be cranky about this, but I will nevertheless never forgive my parents for this. I was too young to put two and two together about 2112, but my brother was not. One of the coveted books on his shelf was Ayn Rand’s Anthem. And by 11 I finally read it, knowing that this was the inspiration for the greatest Rush album ever made. But Rush made interesting songs about interesting topics. I first was inspired to read Shakespeare and Mark Twain thanks to Rush. I also learned that even choosing not to decide is making a choice. And Rand, for all her faults, is a gateway to Asimov and Phillip K Dick.

This habit followed me into my teens. I saw my first band live at Chain Reaction in Anaheim in 2009. I was thirteen, I believe. This weird little Kentucky band opened for The Gaslight Anthem, but I wasn’t there for that Springsteen wannabe crap. I wanted to see weird Kentucky Band. Enter Murder by Death. We still passed around mix CDs for a little while in highschool before the iPod things arrived. And a great friend of mine was making mixes for the group, trying to sus out new music for everyone based on personality. I received a Black Keys record and Red of Tooth and Claw by MbD. Black Keys are a miss for me, but MbD? This was a fundamentally enriching addition to my life. Don’t get me wrong, I was raised on a solid array of albums. Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, Op Ivy, Sing Loud, Sing Proud by Dropkick Murphys, Glenn Miller Orchestra, Perennial Favorites by Squirrel Nut Zippers, Misfits, 357 String Band, etc. However, until this point, it was not apparent to me that independent artists existed at all. And that they were so much more interesting than the mass produced stuff (a lot of the time). Murder by Death opening for Gaslight Anthem. Honestly a hell of a lineup. It was their lyrics that at least partly drove me to start writing stories of my own. MbD songs are American Gothic with a good mix of gallows humor. But for the most part, they’re all stories. Stories about workers trapped in mines, stories about girls going missing, stories about junkie brothers and murder and redemption. MbD got me into Poe and Faulkner. And there I was trying to emulate these stories, their textures, how they made me feel, how they made me go “ooooh”.

In 2008, MbD released a record meant to be the companion to Jeff Vandermeer’s Finch. I didn’t know Vandermeer, but if the best band in the world liked them, he had to be good. I bought the record and the book. I still have both. Vandermeer is my introduction to Lord Byron and Lovecraft. New textures. New cool shit.

I guess, without knowing it, I’d always been a concept record kid. Raised on Sinatra’s Wee Small Hours and Subhumans From the Cradle to the Grave, I’m not sure I had a choice. In fact upon discovering the term “concept record” I found myself on a long journey through the sphincter of the internet landing on classics like SF Sorrow and Making Movies by Dire Straits. While these records don’t have any explicit literary value, they cultivate a sense of cohesion, specifically how to ebb and flow totally (or atonally). The concept record also gives way to classical, for the same reasons. Lo and behold Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suites become vital to me in my early teens. In fact when I was making short movies as a wee baby, In the Hall of the Mountain King became a staple for me. But again, it was about finding texture. I wanted to make stories that captivated me like these albums. Stuff that stuck in my head and stuck in my head to this day, even if I haven’t heard these records in a decade. Those jarring opening notes from Abduction still give me full body chills even just to think about. I can’t help but wonder if Andrew Lloyd Webber lifted at least a portion of this record for some of his more moody arrangements in the Jesus Christ Superstar concept album with Murray ahead and Ian Gillian.

All that to say, I learned structure from music. Of course the literary influences of these artist helped, but they were not my first stop in the study.

After my mother died in 2012, I dropped out of college and had to relearn what it meant to be a human. Without my best friend Jared, I’d be in a ditch somewhere. And without another band called Streetlight Manifesto, I likely would have never worked my way out of suicidal ideation. The Hands That Thieve came out a couple months after my mother’s death and that album, while not their best, simply changed my life. I had already studied Camus, thanks to Streetlight but this album put a little bit of piece inside me. Your Day Will Come, in particular finishes off the album the same way that This is the Life brings Living Colour’s Time’s Up to a perfect head. I recall being in the mosh pit at that first Streetlight show I saw with Jared six months after my mother died. We found each other in the pit, both of us had lost our t-shirts (mine was a sick Goddamn Gallows shirt that I will always miss) and we were both sobbing. That was to A Better Place, A Better Time, a song that has undoubtedly saved more lives than any Suicide Prevention Hotline. I know two personally.

Beyond the music are the movies. When I was first entering college in 2011, I was certain I was going to make movies. I dropped out my second year and went right into the industry, good at making networking connections and all. But after a year of working four jobs and doing night school for physics, I had a major debilitating panic attack that told me the industry was not right for me. In retrospect it was probably the lifestyle not the industry, but I nevertheless grew to hate it. I still loved movies though.

In 2007, to my mother’s chagrin, we went as a family to see There Will Be Blood. Talk about a movie to change your perspective on movies. Up until that point most of my movie watching experience had been the classic war movie. Kelly’s Heroes, a Bridge Too Far, Hunt for Red October and Blue Max type shit. Great movies. Other than that, the goofy 80s comedy. Captain Ron, Blues Brothers, Animal Hous, older comedies like Buster Keaton’s collections, Abbott and Costello, etc. again, great movies. But Limited. There Will Be Blood, PT Anderson in general introduced me to new cinematic textures. I didn’t know you could make a post modern movie. I didn’t know you were allowed to be aware of the camera’s mechanized motions, and that this could aid the shaping of a story. Without realizing it, this opened a whole new realm of writing, long explored by greater writers before me. I didn’t know the reader could know the story was being written. When I later found out that everyone else already knew this I felt like a dingus. But some of those early short stories that I wrote going into high school shaped my entire villain arc. It was because of those movies. Anderson, Kubrick, etc that I felt comfortable pushing my boundaries. I thought stories were always the same all the time. I didn’t know they could be radical experiments.

Admittedly, even with all this fiction in my quiver, I was never really a fiction guy. I loved movies but I didn’t love a lot of fiction. I loved Stephen King because he was everywhere in my house, Christine being my favorite to this day, the first quarter of Desperation being a close second. But I liked non-fiction best. I don’t know why but I suspect because I was a busy kid and picking up and putting down fiction and picking up and putting down and… meant that I never got the chance to fully invest myself. But with nonfiction, even if I forgot where I was, I could logically infer how we got from one place to another with the thrill of learning something new. I was a history fiend first and foremost. Give a child like me a library card and he’s gonna come home with books you don’t want him reading. He’s gonna know a lot about Unit 731, LBJ’s role in the Kennedy assassination, Cold War espionage and the Paris Commune. This all felt like forbidden knowledge too, which is another great attractor for me. And of course, the desire to acquire that which should not be known always leads to science writing. Frank Wiljcek, Sean Carroll and James Gleick guided me through high school. But at the same time I was also studying theology for school. Theology is perhaps the greatest influence on everything I’ve written. To this day St. Athanasius remains my favorite Christian writer and Descent into Hell by Charles Williams is perhaps still the most horrifying book I have ever read. And to study theology is to inevitably stumble across some weird theology. At some point I started taking writing seriously and I sent a few stories to one of my professors, who gave me great feedback (Home Coming) but also put a book in my hand that greatly influenced Becoming. This is a work of French postmodern theology called God Without Being by Jean Luc Marion. Influential, yes. Did I understand it? No. But it guided me to Anti-Oedipus, Simulacra and Simulation and the general pantheon of Zizek’s work. Another of my professors and friends from high school wrote a book recently about early iconography that I cannot wait to dig into. Hope you’re well, Mr. Garten.

But a fiction writer has to read fiction. I forced myself to study, reread the old greats and some new greats. That’s how someone discovers Chuck Palahniuk, who, really, my brother showed me if I’m being honest. But I can give myself full credit for discovering Shirley Jackson, who is perhaps the single most influential fiction author for me. Her work is layers of texture, culture and horror I never knew could be layered. Hangsaman is my favorite novel of hers you cannot convince me any of her other work is any better than this masterpiece. And in my genre, I found China Millville and Samantha Schweblin to be vital pieces of my journey as well.

Last night I released my first novel, Becoming with Mischievous Muse Press. I cannot say how ecstatic I am and how afraid I am and how much I now hate this book because it is an emotional burden. I appreciate the death of the author because of the author is not dead then any praise or criticism for my book means something about me, and I don’t think I want it to mean something about me. The way that my influences are a sort of infinite regress into culture and ideology is how I want my book to be received . I want my book to just be my influences and not me. But it is also me. In the passing down of information, memetics are genetics. It’s impossible to read any work without also simultaneously reading that work’s inspirations. But these inspirations are fielded through the perspective of the writer you’re directly reading. My favorite part of reading fiction lately is reference/inspiration hunting. Because if I know the reference, I can also determine the writer’s perspective and determine if they have analyzed their reference correctly or incorrectly. It’s a dialogue between me and who I’m reading. If you read Becoming, know you are reading The Offspring. You’re reading Captain Ron, St. Athanasius, Robert McChesney, Murder by Death, etc etc. but this tells you nothing about the book, unless you’re looking for it. It’s more fun to look in my opinion.

Last night I also saw Murder by Death’s farewell tour at a little desert bar called Pappy and Harriett’s. I cried a little. Mostly because it was the first concert I saw, and I had gone with my father who is now dead. My wife coddled and babied me and she knew how important this stupid show was, and she is the greatest person on the planet for allowing me to be an eight year old lost in the mall for a few hours. I miss my parents a lot. They were my favorite people. When it comes to influence, there is none greater. The best people I met, and I felt that way when they were alive. This isn’t a bullshit elegy where guilt is mutated into veneration. I wish they were here to read the book, give feedback, anything. But the fact is that their DNA is all over this thing. And today when I crack it open to make sure for the millionth time that it’s not the stupidest thing ever written, I see their influence. I am nothing if not for them. Biologically of course, but culturally and ideologically, almost moreso. From a maybe deterministic causal perspective, this book doesn’t exist without them, they are a necessary and direct pathway to the emergence of Becoming. Like the meme:

Martha Garcia died 2012

Ken Garcia died 2023

Becoming born 2025, welcome back Ken and Martha.

Jokes aside, I hope you give this book a chance. You can buy here