It’s rare to come across a book so thoroughly original it almost defies comparison. As I read James Reich’s bewitching new novel The Moth for the Star (7.13 Books), it frequently felt as if I were watching a film that might have been a collaboration between David Lynch and Terrence Malick rather than turning the pages of a literary psychological thriller—although that description only offers half the picture.

The Moth for the Star is at once a harrowing mystery, an eerie romance, and a postmodern picaresque that spans England, Cairo, Venice, and New York from the first years of the twentieth century through 1930, with the circumstances of the murder at the novel’s core remaining in question until its arresting and utterly surprising conclusion.

I read this compact but sprawling novel with its alternating points of view and impressively vast landscape in a two-day binge while in the Mojave Desert—the Egyptian desert juxtaposed on its pages with rainy late-fall New York, one year after the catastrophic 1929 crash. It really did seem as if I were under a spell. Reich is a master at creating suspense and intricate interiority—even his villains have an air of tragedy and pathos. Christine Sneed spoke with James Reich about his fascinating new novel for The National, in a conversation she titles, “Knowing Your Devil.”

Q: The Moth for the Star is unlike any other novel I’ve read. Part investigation, part fever dream, part haunting–what was the impulse that led you to write the first word and carried you through to the last?

A: The first image was always of the character of Charles Varnas lying on the sand dune, idly aligning his shin with the slope of the pyramid in the distance, the razor, and the impression of a dead body beside him. I wrote that opening paragraph, and then the line from Jung’s Red Book struck me with great force, and it became the guiding epigraph of the novel, that “Every attentive person knows their Hell, but not all know their devil.”

I always conceived of the book as a romance, but a perverse one. Who or what is devil to whom? That is the question, as it were. And the failure to identify one’s devil is the central tragedy. Isn’t that always the way? Some of the novel surely comprises my searching out my own devil.

Q: This novel’s great crisis and central mystery is, as I see it, both Shakespearean and biblical, but I also noticed what might be the influences of Philip K. Dick and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Were you consciously inspired by any of these writers and texts?

A: We owe Milton our sympathy for the Devil; the blind yet visionary Milton who, like Tiresias, presented Satan as the tragic rebel angel to the future, or eternity. Certainly the Western debt goes back to the transgression of Prometheus, but it’s through Paradise Lost that the biblical adversary falls so profoundly into our sight.

In creation mythology, it is the trickster who defines our humanity as we know it. Wishing for a prelapsarian state is pathological, in the sense that it erases what it is to be a sovereign individual. So, you’re right, Milton is important to this novel, as is Kierkegaard. I tend to approach biblical material existentially.

I hadn’t thought about Philip K. Dick in relation to The Moth for the Star, but I admire him, and his work exerts a strong influence on me, certainly in my previous book, The Song My Enemies Sing, he haunts the whole novel, with Bradbury and Ballard. PKD is synonymous with a kind of modern or schizoid subjectivity now, isn’t he? The religious aspect of his work doesn’t always get the attention it might. As for Shakespeare, my hands are up, I’m deeply indebted to Hamlet in general. He’s behind everything I write.

Q: Poetry figures prominently in The Moth for the Star, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poems most notably. In fact, it seemed as if poetry literally saved Charles Varnas’s life in a scene that takes place in Cairo when he’s still a boy. He also writes poetry but has been blocked for years. Would you comment on the role poetry plays in this novel? You might have made Varnas a journalist like his father was for a while, or an assassin (he’d certainly have cause), or a politician, but poetry is his calling.

A: That scene, where the boy Varnas is introduced to Hopkins’ poem “The Windhover” – without the Oxford education and what happens to Varnas subsequent to being taken under wing – is precisely what happened to me. I was removed from class in the same way, and introduced to the same poem. It happened more than once. It was, frankly, a little bullying from those of my friends who noticed and suspected sexual motives that made me break it off and distance myself from that private intervention into my schooling, but the talons of the poem were in.

You can’t shake something as numinous as “The Windhover.” I use it when I teach poetry. That part of my childhood happened because I already wanted to be a poet and apparently kind people had noticed. I’m a broken record when it comes to Dylan Thomas, as you know, especially with a drink in me. But it was with Gerard Manley Hopkins that I was lured out of class. I’ll never know what the real motives were. I didn’t suspect anything sinister at the time. It was more that others did, and I was influenced by their fears, prejudices, projections, or perhaps plain malice.

Part of me regrets distancing myself. Part of me wonders if I was almost dangerously naive. There were certainly predatory types and sadists among my teachers. “The Headmaster Ritual” by the Smiths resonates with almost everyone who went to school in England at a certain time, the corporal punishment, the innuendo, the humiliations, and sexual corruption that you feared. Old men with canes, gym teachers wandering the showers…The headmaster who had you memorize the Metaphysical Poets, or else… Yes, “spineless bastards all,” as Morrissey sang. That’s why films like  If…. by David Sherwin, John Howlett, and Lindsay Anderson matter so much. If you didn’t grow up in a period when teachers could hit you and demean you with impunity, it’s hard to imagine.

By my early teens, separate from the removals from class, I knew of two men who were almost certainly sexual predators. Well, one definitely was because he paid off a boy I knew, weekly money for ‘favors and silence,’ as it were. The other sadist was a more public figure, and that gave him some cover. We were just kids. But there were adults who must have suspected, or known. I think plenty went to the grave with those men.

Q: Much of this novel is set in New York City, 1930, almost exactly one year after the stock market crash that reverberated catastrophically around the globe. How did you enter so deeply and convincingly into this time period? I.e. what research and travels – both literal and figurative – did you take part in?

A: My research is always pattern recognition. Nothing is included for accuracy or authenticity alone – the material history must become the psychological history in the novel. That’s my technique. I like the bell jar of the book to ring on the inside. If it’s convincing, then I believe that is why.

I’ve never been to Cairo, or Venice, but they exist for me in a cinematic sense, an uncanny, literary sense. They haunt me as much as I haunt them through the writing. An exception is the Chrysler Building, which I am more familiar with in person. The Crash of 1929 functions like “the Fall,” the necessary loss of innocence, and of course it comes with literal falls, like the suicides that came in its wake.

Q: Campbell, Charles Varnas’s lover, has unusual powers – I’d call her a clairvoyant (or a seer, if that’s more fitting). Her father, we learn early in the novel, is in fact the Devil, but she herself is not satanic in the usual sense of the word. I’m likewise very curious about her and her embrace of the dark arts. Is the occult something you’ve long had a (scholarly, if not executive) interest in? 

A: If Campbell were in The X-Files, she’d have a poster that reads “I Don’t Want To Believe.” But she has no choice. It would seem that she knows both her hell and her devil, but does she? When we meet Campbell, she’s still reality testing. She wants to doubt, but it’s impossible at a certain point.

Sitting here next to a book on John Dee, and a couple on hermeticism and alchemy, it might appear that I’m somewhat spiritually inclined, but I have no spirituality at all, no belief in any kind of disembodied consciousness or of duality or the disposability of the body. It’s the intensity of the symbolism, the metaphor…Images and the consequences of images: that’s what enlivens me, the inherent danger of archetypes, of the sublime, the risk. I’m interested in the occult psychoanalytically and artistically, but my atheism is well-entrenched.

Q: The title comes from a line in a Shelley poem, “To–”: “I can give not what men call love,/But wilt thou accept not/The worship the heart lifts above/And the Heavens reject not,–/The desire of the moth for the star…” Campbell calls Charles her moth. How would you characterize their relationship? They’re so often together and have been for several years, but they don’t share a residence, for one. 

A: When I was writing the novel, I thought “How am I going to describe this strange story?” I think it was quite early on when I started referring to it, half-jokingly,  as “the satanic Gatsby.” Between Varnas and Campbell there is a fatal longing, precisely that of the Shelley poem. I think that even people in close proximity can feel that ache for the other, even to the point where love risks annihilation. There’s a very deliberate allusion to Harry Crosby and Josephine Noyes Rotch, speaking of fatal attraction. And they know how dangerous their relationship is. I see them as something like a young Paul and Jane Bowles; Jane with her superstitious and occult side and Paul with his own strangeness. They’re aliens of a sort. They’re careless with any attachments, except to one another. There’s a kind of demented glamor that I’m drawn to; that’s where I must fit the title of the novel, also.

Q: You used to own a bookstore in England and now are the founding editor and publisher of Stalking Horse Press as well as a novelist and poet. You also write music criticism for magazines such as Spin. Would you comment on this trajectory and the synergy of your work as a music critic and your other prose and poetry writing?

A: I worked in bookselling for about ten years in Bath, England, and the last couple of years of that were as co-owner, with my wife, of an independent bookstore. The financial market crash that really took hold in 2007 had its beginnings in the year before, and that affected us, and made the situation untenable. But there are new stores there in our wake, where new independent bookselling had largely vanished.

Stalking Horse Press will be in its tenth year next year. I started it because I realized there were some things I knew how to do, and I wanted to help people who deserved to be published, but were overlooked for whatever reason. I wish I could do more, honestly. That’s probably true of a lot of small press publishers.

This year, I’ve published Matthew Binder’s Pure Cosmos Club – how a larger press didn’t snap that up and sell film rights is beyond me - and there are a couple of debuts from Jarrod Campbell and Keith Rondinelli still to come as we speak - Jarrod’s The Reason I’m Here just got some nice attention from Lambda Literary, and galleys for Keith’s A General Theory of Tears are going out this week. I just published work by Santa Fe Poet Laureate Darryl Lorenzo Wellington. We’ll round out the fall with Michael J. Wilson’s A Labyrinth, which is going to be a beautiful book and a compelling slant on the Daedalus story.

I find myself writing about musicians and psychology. I like the Dionysian aspects of music and musicians. Actually, writing and thinking about The Moth for the Star and the idea of identifying one’s devil, you see musicians struggling with that all the time – the mad fans as Bacchae, the sparagmos – but, it happens in literature also, of course. Watching J. K. Rowling’s original Bacchae turn against her has something of that inevitable dramatic quality.

Q: What are you working on now, if you don’t mind sharing a few details?

A: Right now, I’m working on adapting my 2017 book Soft Invasions as a screenplay. Soft Invasions is another novel about a peculiar couple. My first book-length nonfiction Wilhelm Reich Versus the Flying Saucers is with Punctum Books and should emerge next year, and also some time in 2024 there will be a return to science fiction with a book that I have with Anti-Oedipus Press who have been so important to my writing. Anti-Oedipus is a wonderful, risk-embracing press, utterly dedicated to weirdness and exploration. Since this is the first interview I’ve done on The Moth for the Star, profound thanks must be given to 7.13 Books and editors Kurt Baumeister and Leland Cheuk for grasping it.

Christine Sneed is the author of the four books, the most recent of which is the story collection The Virginity of Famous Men.  Her work has been included in publications such as The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New England Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and Glimmer Train.  She has received the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation, the Chicago Writers’ Association Book of the Year Award, and a number of other awards.