An Interview With Robert Creekmore, Author of the Prophet Novels

 I first met Robert Creekmore at a Noir at the Bar reading in Hillsborough, North Carolina’s Yonder Bar, which may well be the ultimate venue for such events. The Venn diagrams of our writing lives overlap quite a bit even though we write considerably different kinds of stories, so we came to know each other more than we might have otherwise..

His first traditionally published novel, Prophet's Debt, was a Manly Wade Wellman Literary Award Finalist. The second, Prophet’s Lamentation, was a Lambda Literary recommendation for July 2023.

One Bite at a Time: Welcome to the blog, Rob. This should be fun.

You’re as personable as anyone I know and I don’t think I’ve ever seen you not smiling, yet your writing is dark. What draws you to that sort of fiction? Dear god, I hope it’s fiction.

Robert Creekmore: Darkness resides in us all, especially those who claim divinity. The difference between myself and a preacher is that I’m honest about mine and am better at interpreting it concisely.

OBAAT: You’re probably best known for your “Prophet” novels. Tell us a little about who the Prophet is.

RC: I based the original Prophet antagonist on a violent sexual abuser I knew of from the Evangelical Church of my youth. Several of the other characters are proxies for rotten individuals.

I was extraordinarily unkind to those characters. Specifically, Prophet’s Debt is said to have one of the most unique castration scenes in the annals of English literature. However, I’m not entirely sure it’s literature. More like a collection of snuff paragraphs.

In the novels, Proffit is a surname taken on by cult leaders. The first was Vernon Proffit. I named him as such and began the trilogy in 1993 because it was the year of the Waco siege. That was the spark that set off the modern Christian Nationalist movement, which we saw bear fruit on January the sixth, 2021.

Why Vernon? Because it was the birth name of Branch Davidian cult leader, David Koresh. I suppose it’s what you’d call an Easter egg. There’s another based around his name. See if you can find it.

I created him as a narcissistic sociopath who believed that the lives of others only existed to either benefit his goals or bring him sexual gratification. Those he’d finished with, especially forgotten children, were discarded in extremely cruel ways for his entertainment.

OBAAT: Your Amazon bio contains this quote: “Annoyed with the stereotype of the southeastern United States as a monolith of ignorance and hatred, [Robert] wanted to bring forth characters from the region who are queer and autistic. They now hold up a disinfecting light to the hatred of the region’s past and to those who still yearn for a return to ways and ideas that should have long ago perished.”

What drew your focus to the queer and autistic?

RC: I’m autistic myself, so that makes sense. However, I am a straight man, so I reckon my focus on queer characters requires some explaining.

Growing up, I had a friend who was gay. I didn’t know that at the time, neither did he. This was pre-puberty, pre-sexuality for either of us. Yet, somehow every adult in our lives seemed to know and treated him worse for it. I wasn’t treated particularly well either, so I chalked it up to the fact that we were both nerds. This was rural North Carolina in the 1990s, after all. In school, if another kid was interested in books and computers, it was reason enough to punch them. This didn’t result in consequences but rather laughter and adulation. 

In 1992, we made plans to watch the Perseid Meteor Shower, which is how Prophet’s Debt opens. We did so on the expansive property where I grew up. It was a bit cool that night, so I went back inside and asked my mother for a second blanket to lay atop ourselves. We were using the first to lay upon.

She made a derogatory comment to the effect that we were going to bed together. I was twelve and didn’t understand completely. Though, I knew that if I were it would have been the end of my life as I knew it. After that night, I wasn’t allowed to see him any longer. I was sent to a fundamentalist, evangelical school. He stayed in public school.

Luckily for my friend, he excelled. He later went on a full ride to Duke and moved to New York City. The two of us reconnected two years ago because of the publication of Prophet’s Debt. He even attended my first New York City Noir at the Bar reading.

I suppose I’d been trying to make up for what happened since that night. In 2006, I became the first Gay-Straight-Alliance faculty sponsor at the high school where I taught in Raleigh, one of the first in North Carolina. Since the publication of the first Prophets book, I have been contacted by several people who have said that it had helped them process trauma or talk to their parents about their youths. This is something I’m extraordinarily proud of.

One side note, my mother’s attitude toward the LGBTQ+ community has evolved greatly since my childhood. She no longer holds the same bigoted positions.

OBAAT: You and your wife lived for several years in a mountain cabin in western North Carolina where you raised your own food and did subsistence hunting. How has that experience shaped your fiction?

RC: It had everything to do with the realistic tapestry that is the backdrop of the Prophets series. I grew up on a farm in eastern North Carolina, so I was familiar with hunting and survival skills. However, the stakes are much higher and the skillset more difficult in the remote Appalachians. I wanted to live the reality before I wrote it.

OBAAT: Who and what are your major influences as a writer? Could be authors, individual books, movies, or television.

RC: Kurt Vonnegut would be at the top of that list. So would Albert Camus. The tattoo I have on my right forearm is a depiction of the black death as illustrated in the first English edition of The Plague. I’ve had it for twenty years. Camus’s picture hangs on the wall above my writing desk.

I loved Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar growing up and am currently writing a literary fiction novel that finds its inspiration within those pages.

I get compared to Chuck Palahniuk often. While I enjoyed his work as a teenager and younger man, I never realized how much I had internalized his style.

The other person my work gets compared to is Quentin Tarantino. I grew up on his movies and it shows. I think what the two of us share is the love of a good revenge story.

OBAAT: In July I heard you read your short story “Sole Survivor” at a Noir at the Bar at Yonder in Hillsborough, North Carolina. It’s a story that begins with cousin incest and becomes less mainstream from there. I laughed throughout, all the while thinking, “I probably shouldn’t be laughing at this,” which I consider to be high praise. That’s a long setup to a short question: Do you set out to drop humor into dark stories, or is it organic to how you write?

RC: Don’t you mean, COUSIN FUCKING? I believe that’s how I framed it that night after having to pause the story because of all the gasps. [Editor’s Note: Yep. He did.]

I don’t set out to write one way or another. I simply try to be my genuine self. Often, what comes out isn’t contemplated before jotting it down. The dark humor is an inexorable part of my flawed character.

The thing is, who I am has been controversial for so long that the things I’ve said, done, and written are only now being absorbed and considered by the public at large. Modernity has produced a mono-culture of cold, calculating phonies chasing clout and currency. To be authentic is difficult and messy in the best of times. Sure, I’m a bit strange but it’s very real, which puts others at ease for reasons I don’t understand.

But, this is neither the best of times nor the worst. I remember when my friends were afraid to be arrested for who they loved, so I’ll take what I can get. However, don’t be too complacent dear reader, descent into hell is only one broken ladder rung away.

OBAAT: What are you working on now?

RC: I’m working on a literary fiction novel about a young woman’s psychiatric break after witnessing the murder of her friend. I should have the rough draft done before the year is out.

After, I’m going to write a crime thriller that’s been begging me to get on the page for a couple of years.

While doing that, I’ve begun collaborating on a graphic novel version of Prophet’s Debt with Mikah Meyers, a graphic artist that I met at Creatures Crimes and Creativity Con in 2023. The first character sketches and cover art are amazing. Mikah is an absolute gem of an artist and person.