Airport Beers with Justin Bryant’s novel ‘Thunder from a Clear Blue Sky’

Airport Beers is an interview series. The following is an interview between Bryan Harvey and writer Justin Bryant. Justin published his novel Thunder from a Clear Blue Sky with Malarkey Books in 2023.

Bryan Harvey: Before getting to your book, are you now or have you ever been a member of Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department?

Justin Bryant: Haha. I’d say no, although I have only positive things to say about her.

BH: I finished reading Thunder from a Clear Blue Sky while waiting for a flight. When did you first start dreaming about the Big West?

JB: I’ve always been interested in the idea of relatively unexplored, mysterious places. The kinds of places with their own local legends and lore. I’m not sure too many of these exist anymore. I grew up in south Florida right next to the Everglades, which in the late 60s and early 70s was probably the closest thing to an unexplored jungle we had in the US. There were alligators and bears and giant snakes, of course, but also, we kids made up wild rumors of swamp monsters and strange people living among them. So I think the idea had probably been stewing in my mind ever since then, and when I started the novel, I took the chance to invent such a place, but with fantastical properties.

BH: With all the fantastical elements that were clearly imaginative, I couldn’t help noticing the scattered presence of soccer throughout the narrative. I know you’ve played at a high level and written a book about it. And I noticed you had your characters discuss being on teams both good and bad as well as scenes where kids play the game and a few instances of figurative language involving the game also. Guess that’s not really a question, but just me saying soccer here [points finger at Justin’s book].

JB: Yeah, I just like working it into my fiction from time to time. It’s such a universal thing, wherever I’ve gone in the world. There are always soccer players or fans. One time a couple of young kids in South Africa noticed my adidas Samba shoes and asked if I played, and we ended up having a fun kickaround game in a park. Same thing in Belize and Guatemala, NYC etc.

BH: Your novel begins with a set piece inside an airplane flying inside a storm. Did that opening scene give you a foothold to start the novel or did you add that later?

JB: A version of that chapter was originally a standalone story called ‘Boulders in the Sky’ that was published in VLAK Magazine, out of Prague. I already had a fair chunk of the novel written at that time, and decided to adapt the story by adding The Tall Man as a passenger, as a way to introduce him. It was a chance to kick things off with some adrenaline — are these pilots going to be able to make it through the storm? — and introduce a character who himself is like a slow-moving storm, in dogged pursuit of our protagonists.

BH: I’ve rescued scenes, or passages, from larger wholes, but I don’t know how often I’ve successfully woven a patch into something larger. Do you have a tendency to do either in your writing? Or was including the standalone into the novel an unusual move for you to make? And I guess I’m thinking there’s something different with how it sounds like you handled that plane scene’s inclusion than simply writing the next step in a linear journey, or the preceding or succeeding scene in a chronological tale.

JB: There was actually another story, a flawed one I never got published, that led to the characters of Juhan and Gayle, the archaeology professor. The story didn’t work, but I felt the characters belonged in the novel, so I expanded and included them. I’ve been writing fiction since the early 90s, and this cobbling of material from other works of mine isn’t something I’d ever done before Thunder. I think it happened because the short fiction I’d been writing had a lot of the same themes and ideas, so it was natural enough to ultimately assimilate them. But other than those two examples, I wrote the novel in a linear fashion. I had to write it that way to ensure I didn’t spend too much time in flashbacks or fever dreams. I felt it was important not to overindulge in that, so that there was a consistent ‘reality’ to keep readers grounded. Obviously Geoff, in his fevered state, doesn’t always know what reality is; and the hotel where the novel ends exists in its own set of mutable physical laws. But I still felt it was imperative to have a narrative that functioned in at least an approximation of reality.

BH: I like world building, but I appreciated your efforts to keep a lot of those elements malaria thin — like the novel never seems overly concerned with explaining itself and the various frontiers that fragment it. Did you do any research because the Dirt Tiger radio blasts come across as artifacts of real propaganda?

JB: I did have to do some research, but I try to get away with the minimum. Research is dangerous for me, because if I get interested in the minutiae of something, I’ll start listing facts and try to make the story interesting that way, and I end up straying pretty far from the narrative. So for the Dirt Tiger radio blasts, I didn’t look for any real examples of strident grassroots calls to action; I just sort of parrotted — with a degree of respect, I hope — fragments of similar things I’ve seen or heard down the years. I did some actual research on hurricanes and how weather services warn the public, because I wanted that element to be accurate. I also had to do a little background on weather satellites and their life cycles to write authoritatively about how they might fail. And the chapter about the Carrington Event and geomagnetic storms was also something I felt was important to get right. Fortunately, though, when your novel includes sloped lakes and time-shifting hotels, you have the freedom to indulge your imagination and play loose and fast with some elements of existence.

BH: Do you have a favorite hotel chain? Or, if the Holiday Inn isn’t really your thing, do you have a running list of favorite literary hotels?

JB: The Grand Hotel Teilchenbeschleuniger is an interpretation of the sanatorium from [Thomas Mann’s] The Magic Mountain. I think of it first and foremost in that original role, but in the novel we also see it as a flourishing resort hotel in the middle of the twentieth century, which was the fate of many sanatoriums once antibiotic treatment of tuberculosis became standard, and then the abandoned version that Geoff and Six find. I don’t have a lot of brand loyalty to hotels. In my day job, we stay in top-end hotels when we travel, and I enjoy the luxury. But I have a soft spot for Motel 6, because they’re dog friendly and cheap and I stayed in them almost exclusively when I drove to Utah and back with my pit bull in 2016. My advice would be to not stay in a Motel 6 unless you have a pit bull with you.

BH: [obnoxiously] Honey, we need to get a pit bull. Have you ever encountered a jaguar, given how the jaguar’s whole deal is to not be seen?

JB: I have not, although I tried very hard. I spent a few weeks in Belize crawling around in the rainforest, hoping to see one — although with the qualification that I was hoping to see one from a safe distance. I know for a fact I got close, because I saw fresh tracks in the mud in the Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary. But I wasn’t lucky enough to catch a sighting.

BH: Earlier you referenced an outdoor childhood. You hike. There’s a great deal of walking and remembering while walking in Thunder from a Clear Blue Sky. Is getting outside part of your process or is it more that those outdoor experiences lend themselves as writing materials?

JB: I think it’s more the latter for me. Walking and being outside in general isn’t so much a part of my writing process as much as it is part of what I do to stay calm. Our dogs are older but still energetic, and so I try to get outside with them as much as I can, to keep them exercised and healthy and mentally stimulated. And I think it’s equally good for me. My writing process is really fragmented and unorganized. When I was in the flow of this novel, through the many drafts, I wrote consistently for a couple of hours late each night. But I’m out of that habit now, and I’m having a hard time carving out a time that feels equally productive for the novel I’m trying to write next.

BH: I get that. I used to write late at night. Then I wrote in the mornings. Then I had kids who had schedules of their own. How does the new novel compare with Thunder from a Clear Blue Sky? Is there a jaguar? Are there sloped lakes?

JB: No sloped lakes in the new novel. There is a surreal element to it, but not nearly to the same degree as Thunder. They differ in that Thunder concerned itself mainly with young people, while the new one is almost exclusively about people who are a lot closer to the end than the beginning. We’re out of the jungles and in a cool, rainy city that could be anywhere in Western Europe. It’s been a lot of fun to go from the excruciating details of the final edits of Thunder, to writing a first draft with the freedom of knowing there is plenty of time to change things.

Justin Bryant is a writer, a traveler, a goalie, and personality on Twitter (@jthouse37). Airport Beers is an interview series. Past sessions include:

• Mike Nagel (April 2023)
• Craig Graziano (May 2023)
• Kamilah Lawson (June 2023)
• Sandra Marchetti (September 2023)