Four years ago, if you’d told me that one day, I’d be interviewing Robert Kloss in my own living room, I wouldn’t have believed you. If you’d told me that I would also be the editor of his ambitious fifth novel—The Genocide House—and his wife, I probably would have thought you were insane.
As someone who occupies this peculiar position of longtime admirer, editor, and live-in partner, I feel an aura of intimacy and unfamiliarity around the construction of The Genocide House. I have seen Robert typing at his desk every day, working on something (or somethings?). I have seen the stacks of books beside his desk, growing and morphing in theme. I have seen stray print-outs of pages punctuated with — s, filled with notes in Robert’s intimidating hand, his weird, wild script, like words carved out with a knife. But even after reading, re-reading, and re-re-reading The Genocide House, much of Robert’s process remained a mystery to me.
The Genocide House is so vast in the scope of its ambition—and so multifarious in its assemblage—that it is confounding to describe. The book is a compendium of American atrocities, as violently blurred and self-obliterating as history itself. From King Philip’s War to the Industrial Revolution, from the trials of Leopold and Loeb to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, from the living room of an Oppenheimer-esque scientist to exploded fields across time, Kloss takes us through the interconnected floors, corridors, and secret chambers of the American Genocide House. In the words of Babak Lakghomi, The Genocide House is “poetic and hallucinatory, a visceral novel of visionary power.” In the words of Kent Wascom, it is “a black and brilliant jewel, with each slashing sentence carving facets one darker and sharper than the next.” And in the words of Johannes Göransson, “It might be Kloss’s best novel yet, adding an inventive, powerful book to a growing authorship that has flourished outside the mainstream channels of U.S. literature.”
On an unseasonably hot afternoon in September, I conversed with Robert about the mysterious construction of this strange and extraordinary book.
Meghan Lamb: As someone who’s read through a lot of your oeuvre, I feel like I can trace several career-wide obsessions within The Genocide House. Among them: a fascination with women in captivity, a fascination with figures who take back a strange kind of control through their own subjugation, a fascination with Bluebeard figures and great men who become poisoned by their own ambition. I’m curious If, as you are working on this book, you had a sense of yourself following in the footpaths of your typical obsessions, or your career-wide obsessions. Did these paths only become clear to you when the book was finished, and you were looking back over the container? Or did they ever really become clear to you?
Robert Kloss: I don’t think it was ever clear to me. I try to keep something from being too much like something that I’ve already done. I obviously recognize that there are certain correspondences between the books, but I don’t think I necessarily thought about that while I was working on it. That would be too much like recognizing what I’m working on in thematic terms, and I don’t think of what I’m working on as being part of an oeuvre. I don’t know that that’s a good process to get into.
ML: Do you feel that once you’ve identified a through thread like that, it could be limiting, in a sense, or do you have a different way of engaging with what you’re working on as you’re working on it, something other than theme?
RK: I mean, I don’t know how other people do things, but if you’re thinking about characters like, oh, here’s another Bluebeard figure, then you’re thinking about them as a construction, or a literary device, which is about as far from my process as you can get.
ML: Yeah, I get that. I wasn’t asking about your obsessions as a craft question so much as a question of what drives you. You admire writers like Melville, for example, who spent so much of his career writing toward obsession. Do you see yourself as that kind of writer?
RK: No, I don’t think so. Not in those ways. Maybe more formal ways, focusing more on how things are told, and not necessarily on the subjects. I guess I don’t really spend that much time thinking about how the things that I’m attracted to relate to each other. I don’t second guess it. I think, If this is a thing that I’m attracted to, to write about, then there must be something to it. I’m being drawn to it for some reason. But I don’t necessarily see it in terms of a connective tissue.
Looking back, obviously, to a certain extent, most writers and artists cover the same ground, because you’re trying to understand things better, and you didn’t quite understand it well enough the earlier time. Or you have a different way of approaching a thing. But I don’t think of it in terms like about paint, or would think of approaching a subject. I don’t think, hey, this time, I’ll try and do the incest thing differently. This time, they’ll molest each other in the second person.
ML: Maybe I already know your answer to this next question, in that case, but you can answer however you want to.
When you’re working on a section of a project, I know you can get really deeply invested in the perspectives of these figures you’re writing toward, that you force yourself to inhabit ways of looking at the world—ways of engaging with language—that aren’t necessarily your own (or, perhaps, they might be those of a shadow self you don’t always align with Robert Kloss as the world knows him).
I’m curious what that’s like. Is it like a kind of method acting, where you go about your day and actually interact with the world around you as your character (in your head)? Or do you have certain boundaries you draw, a certain methodology for “going deep” into these figures, these perspectives, and the landscapes they inhabit? Do you have to extract yourself from your own day to day reality and artificially cultivate a different day to day, reality in your imagination, or is it more like tapping into a kind of shadow self? Or some combination of both? How do you engage with these perspectives without necessarily identifying with them?
RK: I think I have to figure out a way into a character, so that the character doesn’t seem like a construction. So, I have to figure out a way in which their perspectives do align with my own. Because the characters are never me—biographically—it’s easier to do that and not have them be me. I can incorporate little aspects of my personality that fit with their situation.
Like The Revelator, for example. I struggled with the main figure for a long time because he was somebody who said that he had a connection to God, and God had given him the holy word, and I didn’t understand why somebody would say that if it wasn’t true. It really kept me from understanding the character. But after a while, I realized that there were a lot of aspects of the character that I completely understood. He authored this fiction of a religion. He literally wrote a book and sold it to the people. When I started to think of him in terms of a writer, I started to understand the process of what leads somebody to do the things he did.
But when I’m writing about two kids who decide that they’re going to break the law and kill for sport, basically to prove that they can get away with it, I have to shift my understanding of things. I have to change my way of thinking, or develop my way of thinking. And I think this is something that’s really changed in my approach to writing, since A Light No More, and that I’ve more consciously realized with The Genocide House. Because all of a sudden, I’m writing about people doing very immoral things, people doing evil things, over and over and over, asking themselves to accept that part of themselves. So, I had to think about life from the perspective of somebody who does evil things but doesn’t judge themselves for it.
I think it helped me understand the world in a different way. We’re kind of trained to judge and critique. Usually, if you’re writing about a murderer as a fiction writer, you’re either endorsing or you’re critiquing. I think I was able to start getting away from that, to embody the position of people who would do those things.
I think a certain kind of nastiness creeps in, kind of like a horror writer who lets darker aspects of themselves peep through. You allow yourself to imagine what it would be like to commit murder, how that has some appeal to it, to be the kind of person who can do these things and not care. What’s that like?
ML: Yeah, that must be appealing to someone with anxiety. I’m sure you’re plagued by caring about things in your day-to-day life that you probably wish you didn’t care about or have to care about.
RK: These are things that are kind of built into us, so you start thinking about how much of the way people think is constructed. How much of it is inherent? After a certain point, are you just the way you are? Or can you reconstruct yourself?
There is a point with every book where I have to get so deeply embedded within the thing that I’m writing. I have to get really obsessed with it in order to carry it through. I guess in The Genocide House, the connective thing is: these are people who learn to do very bad things and learn to appreciate it, like they’re slowly breaking down their defense mechanisms until they can’t deny it anymore.
You get so obsessed with certain parts of a book that you’re researching—or viewpoints that you’re looking at—that it begins to shift your point of view. You don’t realize it until all of a sudden you catch yourself thinking about things in a different way. Your thinking aligns with them. Your perspective is just completely, radically shifted, and you realize that that probably happened as a result of the book.
Maybe things go back to normal after after you’re done … or you think, well, now I have to write another book, and it’s going to take a couple years to develop a new way of looking at things, just so that it’s not the same thing, particularly if you’re writing about the same kinds of characters over and over again.
ML: I’m curious about that idea of things going back to normal or not.
RK: Yeah, what is normal?
ML: What is normal, and what would that even mean? Do you come out of a trance that you put yourself into—or have to be in—to write what you’re writing? Or in some ways, do you stay in that trance the entire time you’re working on the book or a particular section? Do you ever come out of fully when you’re working on a book? Or do you kind of carry that voice with you in your head while you’re like … doing laundry or grading papers?
RK: No, unfortunately, I can’t. I’d just be an entirely anti-social creature, and … I guess that’s a bad thing.
It takes longer and longer for me, not to snap out of it, but to get back into it. If you have obligations and tasks that pull you from a book, it not just the physical time away from it, but the mental and emotional time. It takes so much longer to remember not just what you were writing, but how to get into the thing. Because you know that viewpoint is just lost, and it takes awhile to tap into it again.
ML: Do you feel like that process of getting into the thing has changed over the course of the different books that you’ve written? Do you feel like it’s easier now? Or harder? Or neither?
RK: Since A Light No More, I’ve definitely been writing more from a vantage where the characters voice their inner anxieties. They whisper, almost like dialogue in theater where they vocalize things that people wouldn’t necessarily say or have access to. That wasn’t something I did before—until I was writing A Light No More—and it’s something that kind of carried through to The Genocide House.
I’m not necessarily sure how that came about. It was just a natural evolution. But it definitely changed my approach to and my understanding of my relationship to the characters. There was a lot more distance in the earlier books, and I was just kind of narrating events in a lot of cases. But they grew progressively more interior, psychological. In The Genocide House, they’re kind of embodying their psychology, in a way. Like a performance.
I think that it’s something that slows my writing down a lot, because it takes so much longer, developing a different way of approaching and looking at the writing process itself, and conceiving what the text should look like. Whereas before, I was just kind of narrating events like, these are the things that are happening. And I could just kind of describe and describe.
The actions of the characters in The Alligators of Abraham are ridiculous and exaggerated, and it’s heavily laced with irony. I’m not trying to understand their thought processes. I’m not trying to make them feel like real people, or to understand their psychology.
ML: Do you think that’s what’s different about the irony in a book like The Alligators of Abraham versus a book like The Genocide House? That in The Alligators of Abraham, the irony distances you from the characters, whereas in The Genocide House, the irony allows you to distance yourself from the characters and identify with them at the same time?
Character seems like such a weird word in terms of the things you write.
RK: Yeah, I don’t like the word, either.
ML: Pretend I never said it. We’re talking about irony, not characters.
RK: Yeah, I don’t really think about it as I’m writing. I’m thinking, how can I write this thing in a way that feels right, and worth continuing with, in a way that I enjoy. And then I’m thinking, is this worth continuing? Does it feel strong enough? But I’m not really thinking any further than that as I’m working on it.
ML: I’m curious what you just said in terms of making it feel right. It reminds me of this interview that I just watched with Annie Ernaux, where she says, I’m not trying to write something beautiful. I’m trying to write something that feels right.
When you’re trying to evaluate whether or not something feels right, do you have a sense of what right means to you? Or is that something that’s changed a lot?
RK: It’s changed. It has to change a lot, I think. That sense of right is a totally intuitive thing. It’s partly about breaking down constructions, breaking down the constructed qualities of the thing you come up with, You’ve got the characters and the plot, and it’s all mapped out, but there’s a constructed quality to that which just feels … off, eventually.
ML: Yeah, I think I know what you mean. You’re too aware of it.
RK: Yeah, too aware of it, or it just feels too much like you know what you’re doing.
ML: You’re trying to control it.
RK: Yeah. So, I think that sense of right is when you feel like you understand what you’re doing on a more intuitive level, and you kind of lock into that. But that’s the hard thing, because it takes forever, the more things you learn and the more ways of doing things you encounter. It’s so much easier to fall into doing things that you understand how to do or going into things with a plan, versus uncovering the method that works best, or a more evolved way of doing something, so that it doesn’t feel like a repeated thing.
That’s the thing that’s really energizing: that locked in state. You’re tapping into something. You’re not just performing a thing or writing it out in a certain way.
When I was a kid, I had a diary because characters in books who wanted to be writers had diaries. I knew I was supposed to keep a diary and write in it. I was always aware that I was performing the diary. Like, the diary-speak.
ML: That’s why I could never keep a diary.
RK: Yeah, I was always like, is this a smart thing to write? And I’d get really frustrated, and I could never just write.
I think fiction writing can be like that artificial diary voice in terms of the characters, the plot, the style. With all of these things, you’re writing in a way you’ve been programmed to write, because you’ve seen over and over that this is how people write about these things, or this is how people talk about them. Or this is the accepted thing. There are all these barriers that keep you from writing in a way that feels right, whatever that is.
You don’t always recognize what’s right in the moment. It’s something that holds up over time, a feeling of, that’s the right direction. But the longer I do things, the harder it is to find the right. The new right.
ML: I’m curious since—obviously—The Genocide House is an assemblage of different parts that you were working on at different points in your life … that you thought—at different points—were going to be different. Did your sense of right change between them?
RK: No, I think you know, that’s the funny thing. There were all these different projects within that book, but I didn’t have to do a whole lot of smoothing out to make them fit together. And you would think that it would take a lot of work, with 5 separate projects, plus all these little aborted projects that I don’t even remember. After a point, I kind of landed on the thing, a sense of the tone, the ethos of the book. And that’s what carried through. It was more about doing that as directly and honestly as possible.
The frustrating thing is, every time I’d start a new thing, I’d have to go through that process again, that whole process of, you’re not doing things because it’s the thing you want to do, or that’s the thing you think that the publisher would want, or that’s the smart thing to do, or the thing you always do, or whatever.
ML: No, and I think that’s what I was trying to gesture to when I was asking you about obsession, about the unifying fabric of all these different parts. In this project, I have a sense that all the parts are unified by the same kind of right.
With this book, it seems like you have a renewed sense of something, that you’re really touching into something about your identity as a writer. What has this book renewed for you, or helped you to get in touch with?
RK: I think the career of any struggling writer is full of peaks and valleys, particularly if you have high hopes and big ambitions. You go into the whole business with this boyish naivete, the hope of being successful. And then, you get broken down. You get cynical and jaded and feel like everything is kind of pointless. The whole process feels pointless. And by process, I mean … with every aspect of the writing process, you think, why do this? No one will ever read this.
I had this sense over and over while writing The Genocide House, that I wasn’t going to be able to finish it, that I’d never be able to finish anything ever again. And then, I finished it. I went through it, and I just felt, this is like the best thing I’ve done. I put this up with anything. So, I think the renewed sense with The Genocide House is a sense of confidence, a new level of confidence in something I’ve written that I’ve never felt before. Before, I might have had that feeling when I was writing something, but not after I was done.
I remember when I finished The Alligators of Abraham, I was like, I’m going to write something even bigger and greater. And after I finished The Revelator, I felt a sense of increasing power and authority.
But The Genocide House is a complicated thing deal with, because, on one hand, I really do believe in it, and it’s everything I could have wanted to have created. I feel very proud of it. I feel very secure with it. I’m not in that unsettled state of trying to push beyond it to do something that’s better.
ML: Has this book changed your understanding of what success looks like to you as a writer?
RK: No, I don’t know what success is.
I will say that the process of publishing the book—the process of finding a publisher—was one that I previously found completely demoralizing. I went through that process with The Genocide House feeling pity and disgust toward the people who rejected it rather than an internal question of, does this measure up. Now, I’m just kind of like, you missed out. You fucked up.
I’m getting older. My days are dwindling. It’s time for me to make a stab at letting people know that these books exist.
ML: Do you see this shelf full of books you’ve written as your proof of life, like your engagement with who you are on this earth while you’re here? Or is it more like the archive you’re leaving behind? Or is it neither?
RK: It’s neither.
For whatever nagging reason, I’ve never given up certain ideas about my destiny. I feel a greater sense of urgency to give it my best shot. I feel a sense of satisfaction with The Genocide House, a sense that I can’t just abandon this book to complete obscurity.
Meghan Lamb is the author of Mirror Translation (Blamage Books, forthcoming in 2025), Coward (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022), Failure to Thrive (Apocalypse Party, 2021), All of Your Most Private Places (Spork Press, 2020), and Silk Flowers (Birds of Lace, 2017). Her work has also appeared in Quarterly West, DIAGRAM, Redivider, and Passages North, among other publications. She served as the 2018 Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University, and currently teaches creative writing through the University of Chicago, Story Studio, and GrubStreet. She is the fiction editor for Bridge (a Chicago-based literary arts publication) and the nonfiction editor for Lover’s Eye and Nat. Brut. She creates music, video, and performance art under the name Iron Like Nylon.
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