An Interview With Luke O'Neil

The Hell World writer talks with us a bit about his book of collected fiction, A Creature Wanting Form

October 16, 2023

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Luke O’Neil is a writer, journalist, and the proprietor of the Welcome to Hell World newsletter that breaks down thoughtful analysis of all the things that are truly fucked today. He’s got two collections of newsletter missives available through OR books, but her recently published his first collection of fiction, titled A Creature Wanting Form. It’s unlike anything I’ve read in the last twenty years or so. Each piece is brief and pointed, stabbing at the heart of it’s subject matter directly, with a conversational tone that brings you right into the mess with the narrator. I’m fascinated both by the subject matter and the form of the book, so I really wanted to interview Luke to figure out: 1. How he did it, and 2. How I can steal his secrets for my own success. The answers to the first one are fascinating, and you can read that below in this great interview. Still working on the second one. If I end up getting rich I’ll probably owe him a beer.

How did A Creature Wanting Form come about? Did you know you were writing a longer work when you wrote your first story?

I believe the first story in the book I wrote was the one about the guy giving blood and the watercolor of an alligator. This may come as a surprise but I wrote that after having my blood taken one day and seeing a watercolor of an alligator. That was a couple years before I turned in the manuscript, 2019 or so. Here and there I would try my hand at some of the others that ended up in the book and some that did not. The thing is, and people who read the newsletter know this, there has always been a sort of literary and poetic element to my writing about real-world stuff. Sorry I used the words literary and poetic. So I went back through the Hell World archives looking for diversions or asides amidst the tumult of the more journalistic news writing that seemed like they belonged to something else that I hadn’t imagined yet and cut them out onto a blank page and stared at them and tried to build a world around them. Somewhere along the way an alarm started going off and I thought ah well I guess it’s time to do a third collection of the newsletter and I talked to my publisher about it and we were looking for a fresh angle and I said wait I have these short stories what about doing this? 

The original life plan was always to write short stories and poems by the way. That was my dream from when I was young. I did like 80% of an MFA in fiction before quitting in the last semester because they wanted me to pay tuition for a full semester just for the part where they read your thesis and I was like fuck this. I happened to get a job working at an alt-weekly in Boston called the Weekly Dig right around that time so I decided I guess I’m a journalist now. The idea of making a living as a journalist was still possible then sort of in the early 2000s. I was not under the delusion that I could make a living as a poet. 

Which of these stories is your favorite?  Which was the hardest to write? 

Oh, that's hard to answer. I must have written these stories over and over dozens of times then re-read them dozens of more times before publishing. Some of them I was happy to read every time, almost like I hadn't written them myself, like they were new to me every time. And some I didn't feel that way about and it was kind of a chore. So I guess the first few in the book would be among my favorites.  

I don't know if any were harder to write than others. Maybe some of the longer ones that are more traditional "short story" type stories. When it's a poem-like thing you can just kind of end anywhere, but in a short story, you have to conspire for something to happen. 

Most of these stories tackle pretty heavy subjects but offer some level of acceptance with the narrator by the end, even if the outcome is dire. How does that emotional endpoint relate to your own personal worldview? 

I’m not sure if it’s me deluding myself to convince myself it’s worth going on or me understanding no one wants to read a constant barrage of bleak violence and death. Probably a mix of both. There has to be a final girl in the horror movie sort of thing you know? A glimmer of light when she crawls out of the basement. 

I think I’ve said this before but something people always remark upon when they write about my writing or send me notes about this or that piece is they always say there’s a hopefulness to it. Some days I think no no no you are reading it wrong! We are truly living in Hell whether or not you have come to grips with that yet. Then some days I think yes yes that is correct. We all must go on together and remind ourselves of the reasons it’s worth going on. 

To be honest though if some of the shit that happens in the book ever happened to me I would probably just lie down. If I get sick or something any time soon and people are talking about how valiantly I fought or whatever that is a lie. I am not going to wage a battle against cancer or war or climate catastrophe or whatever it is I am going to get my ass kicked in. 

A lot of these stories deal with super-heavy themes. Do you have any reading advice for someone who’s about to pick up A Creature Wanting Form for the first time? 

Readers often write to me about my books and say, like, wow, I read that in one or two sittings. I should not have done that. The stuff can be heavy, but they’re always funny too, or meant to be, so there’s a pressure valve release in most of them where it sort of lightens the load. I think the ideal way to read this is sort of like you would a book of poems. Pick it up, read one or two, let them settle in, and come back the next day. 

One of my personal favorites is “Proverbs,” which retells a classic proverb in a traditional joke format. How difficult was it to balance humor with the heavier subject matter that these stories dig into? 

Oh I'm glad you liked that one. I thought this is either gonna be the stupidest piece in here or it's going to really go over and I had no idea which it would be. 

I think the only concern I had about trying to include humor throughout was to make sure I was hitting the right target. The powerful and not the powerless. The one about the guy lowering the flag to half mast over and over again because there was another shooting for example. Obviously there's nothing funny about mass shootings, but I wanted to highlight the absurdity of our inability to do a single thing to stop them from happening every other day. 

A lot of these stories are written with an immediacy to the narrator’s voice that makes them feel very real and in the present. How much of yourself do you find ends up in these characters?

Well some of them are just obviously me writing about things that actually happened to me, but that’s maybe like 25% or so. I didn’t set out to write vivid and memorable and distinct characters for the most part anyway though. The focus is sort of supposed to be on the outside forces and systems conspiring against us or crushing us indifferently, and I guess many of the characters react to those things in a kind of aloof way, even while knowing things are horrible. What difference does it make really when confronting the vast power of the ocean if the character is this kind of guy or that kind of guy, you know? 

As for the immediacy thing I really liked the idea of just dropping into a scene without much wind-up. Here we go, we’re in this place now, let’s get going. It feels to me the way a person would tell a story when speaking it out loud. You don’t frontload your story with scenery and so on, you go, “so there I was and the guy says to me…” 

Speaking of the voice being modeled after a guy telling a story, a lot of the narrators feel like they’re in a direct conversation with the reader which makes even the fantastical sound grounded and believable—almost like a Studs Terkel account. Do you think working in journalism affected your fiction style, compared to before your alt-weekly gig?

Yeah definitely, especially in terms of the subject matter at hand. I was probably just writing sad love stories and shit when I was younger. Whatever a young man is preoccupied with. Himself mostly. Now I just write about whatever a middle-aged man is preoccupied with. Still himself but more in terms of the looming mortality thing. Half joking there. It all comes now with a lot more attention paid to the systemic suffering as opposed to being squarely focused on the interpersonal. School shootings, corrupt police, the ravages of climate change, and indifference from the powerful to all of those things make up the bulk of the stories here.  

What’s the main thing you hope people get out of reading this book?

I want people to feel like I feel when I read authors I love or listen to the music I love, which not surprisingly, tend to be the ones who can mix the darkness with occasional humor, and convey how it is to be alive in the moment we are living. I may not like the things they are describing, but man do I love the way they are doing it. 

Read

You read the interview, now read the book. A Creature Wanting Form is, to put it plainly, one of the only works of fiction that seems to be fully in touch with the exact time it was written. It’s easier to digest the last few years and plug a book idea into the recent past than it is to place characters into last week, but O’Neil does an incredible job of dunking readers into the existential or supernatural terrors of modern life—whether that’s a literal monster, or just grappling with knowing how to hang a flag at half-mast when there’s a new mass shooting every day. What makes it all work, however, it’s the prose itself—written with an immediate voice in a conversational tone, each story is lean and charged with momentum. If anything, A Creature Wanting Form is the dark world mirror of a Borges collection: instead of erudite academics delivering unto us universal world truths through rigorous study, O’Neil’s barstool philosophers give us a “life sucks” monologue that peels back the protective shell around your own humanity further than you ever imagined it could go. Reading it almost feels like poking at a raw nerve, but sometimes you gotta just pick at something until it bleeds in order to know your heart is still pumping blood the right way.

Watch

God bless the horror schlock auteur. I was delightfully thrilled when Frankenhooker turned out to be a well-directed, well-acted, actually funny comedy horror romp. It revels in its exploitation while undermining it at the same time, essentially buttering both sides of its own bread for every type of movie viewer. In summary, a New Jersey amateur mad scientist’s girlfriend gets eaten up by the automatic lawnmower she bought for her dad, and the only way to get his girlfriend back is to find new body parts that he plans to steal from sex workers. For a 1990 horror film, it’s got a moderately progressive and mildly moralistic conclusion, but the main show is a cavalcade of practical effects that, frankly (or Frankenhookerly) look great 33 years later.

Listen

Rudolph Isley just died at the age of 84, leaving Ron and Ernie as the last remaining brothers. Original a vocal trio of Ronald, O’Kelly, and Rudolph, The Isley Brothers made their mark in NINETEEN FIFTY-FUCKING-NINE with “Shout,” a song they wrote and recorded themselves. They also were the group that made “Twist and Shout” a smash hit three years later (even though they didn’t write that one). But the fact that they had a hit in the 50s means that The Isley Brothers have been an entity for eight decades. That shit’s nuts, man. They’ve pioneered at least 4 different genres of music in that time, successfully ran their own record label so bigwig execs couldn’t get rich off of them and steal their money, and now we’re finally dealing with what everyone has to deal with eventually: the fact that recorded history is shorter than we think, and basically everyone we know in pop culture is going to start dying off in massive numbers. I don’t know if we’re ready for that kind of psychic damage as a society, but at least we can enjoy “Shout” in the meantime.

Consume

We’re rolling deep into citrus season, and you know what that means: the three weeks out of the year that oranges are fucking incredible. The rest of the year we have tangelos and cuties and mandarins as a stop-gap measure, but true orange season is something to behold. A few years back I was in LA for a work trip and was invited out to a co-worker’s house where they were going to try to sync up that four-disc Flaming Lips album. They couldn’t get it to work, of course, so instead I stood around in their backyard just picking and eating oranges off the tree. Valencia, navel, it doesn’t really matter which variety you grab as long as they’re ripe and in season.

Artwork by Ashley Elander Strandquist. You can view her illustration work here and check out her printing business here.