I'm in Sbarro's at the Briarwood Mall, just a little early for a meeting with John Silence, author of a collection of short stories entitled A Cloud of Blood and the novel Scarlet Night. He arrives so precisely on time I imagine him standing outside finishing a cigarette, one eye on his precision chronograph, making sure to enter the building precisely twenty seconds early so that he breaks the plane of the restaurant entrance at exactly 13:00. Silence strides up to the table, his 1.9 meter, 100 kilo frame stuffed into a olive drab British commando sweater and dark dress slacks, his eyes obscured by mirrored aviator sunglasses. He strides up to the table and sits with his back to the wall, instinctively taking a position from which he can see the entire room and all the exits. The twenty-year SEAL hasn't changed his stripes.

Christopher Peck: Tell me about the new book. What can we expect next from John Silence?
John Silence: I'm working on a novel about a modern-day hobo, in a way, a man who has examined mainstream American society, it's values and lifestyle, and just said, "No." The working title is Blood Sick.
CP: Why Blood Sick?
JS: Well, it's a combination of things. Blood for the violence, sick because the character is plagued by a variety of ailments. Blood Sick because he's tired and ashamed of his hunger for causing pain and injury, sick of his violence, and because he's sick, as in twisted and just wrong, right down in his blood, the stuff that keeps him moving and alive and active. But I'm really just getting started on that. Not much to report as of now.

CP: A lot of your work is like that, terrifically bloody and violent. Some stories, take "Mikey's Room" or "A Cloud of Blood", your most famous and controversial work, for example, just seem painful, disgusting, and gratuitous. Some people claim that it is sick and disturbed, that it has no artistic or social value. How do you answer that?
JS: Really that's not even an intelligent or even reasonable view of my writing. Yes, there's violence, pain, even true evil. At least I hope there is true evil in some of my stuff. But I don't see how it can be said to be gratuitous. I'm not making this shit up. I write about a part of humanity that is there, it exists, but people want to forget it because we're taught that it's wrong. But I don't think ignoring evil makes it go away. I'm not going to sit here and make the "could good exist if there weren't evil to compare it to" argument but I will say that we have to at least acknowledge and examine what I call the "will to evil" if we want to solve our problems with crime and violence.

CP: So you're acting like a therapist in some ways, using aversion therapy.
JS: No, not really, aversion therapy tries to associate undesired behavior with an unpleasant experience. Clockwork Orange I think is still the definitive and final word on that subject. I'm trying to get people to face the fact that for some reason we still have the old predatory, animal instincts within all of us. We've tried to bury them or sublimate them, but they're there, and all our rules and our refusal to even acknowledge them frustrates those drives. It's an old self-help/twelve step cliché that the first step to solving a problem is admitting that there's a problem. And I don't think we as a race have come to terms with the fact that we remain predators.
CP: That sounds like a theme that Andrew Vachss deals with quite a bit. A lot of negative criticism of your work revolves around similarities with Vachss' work.
JS: Jesus. Why don't you just drag [Bret Easton] Ellis's [American] Psycho into this too? Those critics are talking out of their asses. What, two guys can't both write about sick fucks and psychos without everyone having to assume one is derivative? I don't even read Vachss' stuff. He writes about carnival freaks, like that fucking midget, what is that? His stuff has no bearing on my work. Is [Brian] Jacques derivative of Wind in the Willows because both portray anthropomorphic animal societies? Can't you people have a little more vision than that?
CP: Let's talk about something else. Soldier of Fortune has called you the "most brutal man alive".
JS: Yeah, they did.
CP: How does that make you feel?
JS: Honestly? Uncomfortable. I'm not some ghoul. I have a family, wife, kids. I don't sit in a cave somewhere tittering to myself while I concoct new ways to make people squirm. I don't masturbate while writing about some sick fuck cutting off a little girl's head with piano wire. I don't actually do these things; this isn't me in these stories, except in the sense that I think I'm exposing something we are all capable of if we put ourselves in the right circumstances.

CP: But you have killed people.
JS: Yes. I spent twenty years in the military. There were wars. But that's different from my writing. Except for a few people who are wired wrong, we don't enjoy ending human life in the military. That's why the training spends so much time desensitizing us. The military realizes that humans have barriers against just wasting another human. Thus the demonizing of the enemy, the euphemisms. We say "eliminate the target" rather than "kill that guy" because we have to be able to kill without a moral breakdown every time. We accept the possibility as part of our job, we're trained to perform our duty without hesitation, but we don't consider unnecessary loss of life reasonable or acceptable. I was a warrior, not a murderer.
CP: All right, I'm not going to get into that with you.
JS: What?
CP: Splitting peas about what constitutes murder.
JS: You shouldn't. Not unless you've been through the training and been in a combat situation. If someone attacked you with a knife, and you had to kill them to save your own life, you'd re-examine your views around the "sacredness" of human life. I don't consider killing to be okay. I'll be the first one dancing on the lawn when we get to a point as a species where we can settle conflicts between us without having to kill each other over it. But we're not there yet.
CP: Let's lighten this up a bit. You have agreed to do a project with the folks over at turtleneck.net?
JS: Yes. They asked me to do a column, sort of a military etiquette thing. But it's not deadly serious. I might poke fun at agony columns, advice columns. It'll be informative but not dry.
CP: What will you be doing?
JS: Well, whatever, it's really up to the readers. I'll answer their questions about life, romance, recipes, etiquette. Some might be curious about my adventures on the SEAL team. But it'll be fun.

Silence finishes his pizza, wipes his mouth, and rises from the table. He nods to me, then turns smartly about on his booted heels and marches out of the restaurant. The interview is over. As he turns the corner to leave, a beam of sunlight reflects off the face of his watch, sending a scattered red puff of light into the restaurant, and as quietly as he came the most brutal man alive is gone in a cloud of blood.

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