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His Methods of Madness
Author Interview Dave Matthes
Bar Nights is a chronicle of the life of Arlo Smith who walks away from his life after finding his wife in bed with another man. Arlo’s finds his life in a troublesome spot in the beginning of the novel. What was your inspiration for his family situation and how he removes himself from it?
The inspiration never really came from anything first hand. One day I just started writing the book because I had nothing else to do, and I had already scrapped several ideas for other books, some of which became short stories. I think mostly though, that feeling of desperation that comes with having had enough of a certain situation that’s been going on for far too long, was something I’ve been through before. How Arlo feels, that sense of apathy, but also pleasure, with starting over, was my biggest takeaway from my own personal life that applied to the birth of the character “Arlo Smith”.
The plot to Bar Nights seems simple, a man tries to bury his pain with alcohol, but there’s complexity in Arlo’s pain and the people he meets. What was your writing strategy in terms of plot design when writing this story?
Thoughts and thought processes. A lot of the time we don’t actually think about the process of “thinking”, and sometimes the point in which we change direction in our thoughts is lost completely. The way I employed the use of “chapters” in Bar Nights and the rest of The Mire Man Trilogy reflects that. The plot design really had no design, at least while writing Bar Nights. I just started writing it one day and kept going with it. There wasn’t really a story, in a literal sense, I was aiming for. Bar Nights was originally intended to be just a short book about a guy living in a bar and all of the people he met there, nothing more.
Arlo is locked in a vicious cycle of self-hate, addiction, and depression that is reflected in the people he meets. Did we get to meet everyone you planned to write or did you take out any characters?
I did take out a few, but at the time that they would have existed in the story of Bar Nights, they were very minuscule. Once I decided to make Bar Nights the first book in a trilogy, I placed those characters in the following books in the trilogy as supporting characters that would hopefully help Arlo more on his journey.
I feel like Bar Nights is an examination of addiction and desperation. How do you feel Arlo deals with these things that’s different from other people?
Different? I think that his methods of madness are only different because at first, he really doesn’t have much to lose. Once he finds his way to the bar “Purgatory”, that’s it for him. He really doesn’t have anyone who cares enough to tell him to stop. And if he never met Constance, for all we know, he would have died there. So in a sense, all he really uses to deal with his addictions, is apathy. Complete, pure, remorseless apathy. He knows he has problems, and he reflects upon them constantly, but he really doesn’t care enough to examine them on a level that may or may not lead to his redemption. Not yet anyway.
Bar Nights is the first book in the Mire Man Trilogy with Madlands being the third book. How do you feel Arlo has developed over the series?
Well, in Bar Nights, even though it’s the first book, we sort of meet Arlo at his middle. In the second book, Paradise City, we’re taken back to “where it all began”, so he’s still a child in those days, and definitely hasn’t reached that purified level of “sheer apathetic asshole”. By the third book, Return to the Madlands, Arlo is pushed passed his “breaking point” in the first book, and beyond to a point in which he is literally faced with the choice of “live your life like this and die like this” or “live your life like THIS, but still… die like this”. The difference being in the choice of the latter, he’d be taking a chance, forsaking what he “set out for” from the very beginning altogether. His story arc definitely reaches a point he never expected (and I never expected while writing it).
“Bar Nights”, the first volume of the “The Mire Man Trilogy”, is a story revolving around Arlo, a man who’s just turned 39. Fed up with the way his life has turned out thus far, he leaves his cheating wife, out of control preteen slut daughter and her “fiance”, his unbearably demeaning job, and hits the highway.
It isn’t long before his car dies on him, and he’s forced to take shelter in the only place available at the time: the for-rent room above a dive bar, named “Purgatory”, positioned seemingly in the middle of nowhere.
Convincing the owner to let him work off his rent, he spends his days drinking and care-taking the bar, running odd jobs for his boss, and spends his nights tucked away in his room drunkenly passing out to the sounds of whoever is playing the music downstairs…until one night he ventures out into the storm eternally encapsulating his world. And their paths unexpectedly converge.
The meeting sets in motion a relentless and remorseless onslaught of emotions, bringing Arlo to the absolute breaking point of insanity and introducing him to a realization that redefines why he ended up at “Purgatory” to begin with.
Bar Nights
Bar Nights by Dave Matthes is the first book of the Mire Man Trilogy, a chronicle of the life of Arlo Smith. Arlo comes home from work to find his wife and another man in the throes of passion on the kitchen counter. He decides that’s as good as a divorce decree, packs a bag, and walks out. In the driveway, his daughter and her boyfriend spark his rage, and he trashes the young man’s car with a baseball bat before he leaves. Arlo drives until his car breaks down, walks to a roadside bar, and stays. The owner, Vance, hires him as the janitor and gives him a tiny apartment above the bar.
Arlo doesn’t want to start over. His soul is already crushed by his former life and marriage, and in this bar, ironically named Purgatory, he has the freedom to be as drunk and indolent as he cares to. His only pleasure is in music. While he gets drunk in his apartment, the piano player downstairs fills his room with music. almost every night. He clings to the music but doesn’t want to meet her. When they do meet, she becomes the catalyst that forces him to face his life, his lies, and the hell he created along the way.
The plot of the story is simple, but there are so many nuances that I’d compare it more to Jazz than literature. Some of the barflies that come and go are character studies of people on the edge, or close to it, and reflect Arlo and Vance’s personal demons. The flow of the chapters adds texture and rhythm. The language is lyrical, sometimes pulling me out of the narrative just to appreciate the prose. Finding these gems was something I enjoyed while reading the novel.
Outside my window, the snow fell like the ash from a volcano…. I remembered looking out my window on Christmas morning as a child, and seeing the snow…. Little moments like that stole me from time to time. Burps and hiccups of nostalgia. A staple of regret temporarily sewing the rips and tears shut.
The author uses chapters in an unorthodox way, some as short as two words. Sometimes this works beautifully, but on occasion, a chapter seems more like a side note, or stray thought. I felt that the novel was repetitive in places, revisiting events and even phrases a few too many times, but in retrospect, some of that was clearly intentional. Addicts can be stuck on emotions or trauma, and that broken-record effect gave more realism to the characters.
Arlo is locked in a vicious cycle of self-hate, addiction, and depression that is reflected in the people he meets. Through Arlo’s eyes, we meet the patrons at the bar, his interactions with them colored by his personal misery. He’s afraid to meet Constance, the piano player, for fear that his illusions will crumble. Of course, fate intervenes, and he finally meets her by accident. They’re not in love, but they need each other to get through the desperation of their lives. Constance shoves him toward rehab, trying to save his life before he kills himself or becomes just like all the other drunks at the bar called Purgatory. Even that irony isn’t lost on Arlo.
This is a book for adults, as the language and situations are not for readers who are easily offended. It’s an examination of addiction and desperation that doesn’t sugar-coat anything. The author doesn’t spare any of the senses on this dive into skid row, and I could see, feel, and smell every detail. If you like Bar Nights, also pick up Paradise City, the next book in the trilogy.
Pages: 209 | ISBN: 1506198961
The Seed That Plants Itself Into His Heart
Paradise City begins with Arlo and his best friend peeping into a stripper’s window trying and see what any young boy hopes to see. But what they see instead changes them forever. Do you think there’s a single moment in everyone’s life, maybe not as traumatic, that is life changing?
I hate to think of myself as believing in anything absolute, as if the same sort of scenario happens to everyone in some way or form. However, I do believe that everyone at some point in their life experiences a moment that separates how they were before that moment, and how they live the rest of their lives as a consequence. For me, as I’m sure most people can relate to, it was the day my father passed away. I remember the day itself starting out like any other in the summer. I was with my friends and everything was perfect. Then it happened and I remember the feeling, like everything that I was was switched off like a light switch. And even as it was happening, I knew that everything would be different from then on. With Arlo, in the beginning of Paradise City, he experiences a similar event, but deep down doesn’t know what to make of it. Instead, it sort of numbs him and sets the stage for the climax. At the end of Paradise City, the confrontation with his best friend, that moment is the moment that is the defining “light switch”. At that moment, even Arlo can’t ignore the fact that everything after that day will be different. It’s the seed that plants itself into his heart which spreads its roots deeper into his body and soul throughout the rest of his life. So yeah, I do think that everyone in some way can relate to that sort of change in their life.
In a lot of contemporary coming of age fiction novels authors often add their own life experiences to the story. Are there any bits of you in this story?
Absolutely. Many of the party scenes were directly translated from memory to page, some of the adult characters were based off of some of my friends’ parents, and on a very subtle level, some of the parts involving Arlo’s mother were taken from my own experiences, though not quite in a literal sense. One thing that stands out the most though, is the feeling I think most kids grow up with, the feeling of wanting someone but never being able to have them. And also, I’ll never forget my first experience drinking whiskey. The feeling Arlo gets in the book when he drinks it for the first time… is pretty much exactly how I felt about it, if it could even be put into words.
Lot’s of bad things happen through Paradise City, but it makes you think about what one would do if in that same situation. What do you hope readers take away from the story?
The main theme of The Mire Man Trilogy, at least from my point of view, is being able to live with yourself after having done something excruciatingly horrible; so.. self-forgiveness in a way, and not letting whatever that thing is completely destroy you. In Book 2, being that it is an origin story, the main focus of the story was to give readers the notion that it’s actually okay to remember where you came from, whether it was a good place or bad place. Really, the only way to fill in the blanks of the future is to remember the past, remember how we got to where we are. We’ve all done horrible things, maybe not quite as bad as Arlo, but then again maybe Arlo didn’t really “do” anything. Maybe that something happened TO him. It’s that combination of question and consequence that drives Arlo forward. By the end of Paradise City, Arlo is left with that consequence, and he has no one and nothing to tell him or explain to him why he’s feeling the way he’s feeling. This is what really starts him on his path that leads to how we see him in Book 1- Bar Nights.
When is the third book in the trilogy due out and what will that be about?
Book 3 is titled Return to the Madlands, and the main theme of this final volume, besides the overall arc of self-forgiveness, will be something along the lines of “self-preservation”. Arlo will be confronted with the idea of death, and what happens after this event. Not necessarily to him, but to his memory. He’s lived mostly his entire life not really caring about what other people think of him, and to some extent that’s actually a healthy way to live, but he takes it to unhealthy and dangerous extremes. In Return to the Madlands, he’ll finally sit down with himself and do a little thinking on that matter. The story itself picks up about fifteen or so years after the present day events of Paradise City, and involves a recently deceased loved one imploring Arlo to hit the road one last time and experience life before he gets too old or dying to get that chance again. The twist here, which won’t ruin the reader’s experience, is that this loved one has been hiding something pretty major from Arlo, and only confesses to it after their death via handwritten letter. This leads Arlo to believe that Constance, the main woman from Bar Nights, (whom Arlo in his own way, fell in love with) is still alive and out there in the world waiting for him to come find her. The first big chunk of the story is all about this road trip, this journey to find Constance, and involves Arlo getting stuck or hindered by several bouts of misadventure. The road eventually leads to Nevada, where he runs into his still-alive, and very old and aging father, which sets in motion one hell of a torrential downpour of emotions for Arlo. Obviously I won’t say much more about what happens from there, but there will be a very, very bittersweet flavor of closure by the end. I’m about a hundred-ish pages written into the first draft, and am shooting for a much larger scale page-count with this final volume, not that the size of a book matters, that’s just how much is going to be going on. If my current work schedule is anything to go by, I’ll probably have the first draft finished by Christmas… maybe. I wrote Bar Nights in four months, and Paradise City in six; I may or may not have rushed through them, so I’d like to really take my time with this one.
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Book 2 in “The Mire Man Trilogy”, “Paradise City”, tells the origin of Arlo Smith, and illustrates the first steps on his journey toward becoming the seemingly soulless nothing he is in “Bar Nights”. It is a story that narrates what it’s like to grow up against the grit and torment of youth while under the vengeful weight of inevitability masquerading beneath the guise of well-intentioned promises… and the price of what true friendship can sometimes require.
LITERARY TITAN 