Q: A Questionable Shape was a book that took a subject matter generally regarded as lowbrow—zombies—and shifted the focus to highbrow discussion; the narrator’s references are similarly broad, ranging from Mad Max and the Goldeneye videogame to Kant and Euripides. Stories in White Dialogues, such as “Destroy All Monsters” and “Two Guys Watching Cujo On Mute,” seem to also enjoy a dip into genre (Kaiju films, ‘80s horror) before expanding into something much larger and unexpected. What’s your approach like?

Sims: In general, I’m interested in the way that everyday consciousness is mediated by culture: how the way you see the world is inflected by the art you’ve seen, and how it doesn’t matter how high or low that art is. To phrase it a slightly different way—since the ‘high/low’ distinction is dubious—it doesn’t matter whether it’s art that you’re proud or ashamed to have seen, or that you even like all that much. I’ll take an example from life rather than from the book. Each fall I’m reliably reminded of Dragonball Z, an anime that I watched on Cartoon Network after school when I was a kid. In the show, martial artists can level up to ‘Super Saiyan’ status by clenching their fists and grimacing: when their inner energy or whatever is unleashed, their hair will burst into this flaming gold mane. So now every autumn, on that one morning when suddenly all the leaves on a maple have turned bright yellow overnight, I’ll find myself thinking, ‘The maple has gone Super Saiyan.’ To say that the tree reminds me of Dragonball Z is simply to say that my experience of it has been mediated by culture, by pop culture, by a cartoon. Because I happened to watch Dragonball Z at a formative age, its imagery is near the bottom of the phenomenological compost pile of my consciousness, where even now—years later—it continues to fertilize the way I see things. There is a pleasure, for me, in this association, and it runs parallel to whatever aesthetic pleasure I might derive from Dragonball Z. I don’t enjoy being reminded of that cartoon because it’s my favorite work of art (I think I was bored by it even at the time). Rather, I enjoy being reminded because analogy is inherently pleasurable.

This is a long answer to your question, but that tends to be the way I approach pop-culture and other artworks in fiction. They are part of the texture of the characters’ consciousness: they’re available to them as references or as raw material for the meaning-making, dot-connecting faculties of their minds. In A Questionable Shape, the characters are confronted with zombies in a world where zombie movies don’t exist, so they have to look toward other culture in order to interpret the creatures: Goldeneye, The Bacchae, Kant. In ‘Destroy All Monsters,’ a character is up late watching a gecko approach a moth on his windowpane, which reminds him, for obvious reasons, of Mothra vs. Godzilla. But he’s likewise reminded of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, King Lear, and the Old Testament story of Lot’s wife. His conscious experience of the windowpane is mediated by all of these other narratives, which is ultimately a characterizing detail (he has formative childhood memories of seeing Godzilla, etc.). And if he happens to have ‘larger’ questions on his mind (death, perception, epistemology), this is in part due to—not despite—having Godzilla on his mind (Godzilla films, after all, have traditionally also had larger questions on their minds).

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