Andrew Fox

Biography

Andrew Fox was born in Miami Beach in 1964. He has been a fan of science fiction and horror since he saw Godzilla and friends romp through Destroy All Monsters at the drive-in theater at the age of three. In 1994, he joined award-winning science fiction author George Alec Effinger's monthly writing workshop group in New Orleans, where Andrew lived for more than two decades. Since 2009, he has lived in Northern Virginia with his wife and three boys, where he works for a federal law enforcement agency.

His first novel, Fat White Vampire Blues, published by Ballantine Books in 2003, was widely described as "Anne Rice meets A Confederacy of Dunces." It won the Ruthven Award for Best Vampire Fiction of 2003. Its sequel, Bride of the Fat White Vampire, was published in 2004. His third novel, The Good Humor Man, or, Calorie 3501, was published by Tachyon Publications in April, 2009. It was selected by Booklist as one of the Ten Best SF/Fantasy Novels of the Year and was first runner up for the Darrell Award, presented for best SF or fantasy novel written by a Mid-South author or set in the Mid-South. In 2006, he was one of the three winners of the Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Award.

Andrew is an outspoken advocate for freedom of speech and thought in science fiction. MonstraCity Press is publishing two volumes of short fiction that, in the tradition of Harlan Ellison's groundbreaking anthologies Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, push the boundaries of what is considered taboo in science fiction. The first volume, Hazardous Imaginings: The Mondo Book of Politically Incorrect Science Fiction, includes two of Andrew's short novels and three of his stories. The second volume, Again, Hazardous Imaginings, features 14 stories by writers from all over the world. Science fiction is not a safe space!

MonstraCity Press has published Fire on Iron (Book One of Midnight's Inferno: the August Micholson Chronicles), a steampunk dark fantasy novel set aboard ironclad gunboats during the Civil War, and will publish the second book in the series, Hellfire and Damnation, in 2021. MonstraCity Press has also published the third book in the Fat White Vampire series, Fat White Vampire Otaku, and will publish the fourth book in the series, Hunt the Fat White Vampire, and the fifth book, Curse of the Fat White Vampire, both in 2021. Other projects forthcoming from this publisher in 2021 include The Bad Luck Spirits' Social Aid and Pleasure Club, a fantasy novel which intertwines a supernatural secret history of New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath; this is a tie-in to the Fat White Vampire series.

Andrew's other jobs have been varied. He has worked at a children's psychiatric center, managed a statewide supplemental nutrition program for senior citizens, taught musical theater and improv to children, and sold Saturn cars and trucks (just before the automotive division was abolished by General Motors). He has also been a mime (in his younger days) and produced a multi-sensory interactive play for blind children in New Orleans.

His oddest association is that he attended high school with Jeff Zucker, who would go on to become the president of NBC/Universal and then of CNN. Andrew's impressions of Zucker can be found in an article he wrote for Tablet Magazine, "Bullies, Inc." It can be found at: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/jeff-zucker-donald-trump

Andrew Fox's website and blog can be found at:
www.fantasticalandrewfox.com

The latest information about MonstraCity Press books can be found at:
www.monstracitypress.com

Smashwords Interview

Tell us a little about yourself and how you became a fan and later a writer of science fiction.

One of my earliest memories is being taken to see Destroy All Monsters at the drive-in movie theater by my parents in 1968, when I was three years old. That got me hooked. TV was full of monster and fantasy movies back then. Adventure Theater on Saturday afternoons alternated between Buster Crabbe’s Tarzan movies and Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad extravaganzas. Every Saturday night Creature Features cycled through the Universal monster series, the 1950s giant bug movies, and all those spooky atomic holocaust/end-of-the-world flicks. But the movies that really pushed my buttons were the Planet of the Apes films. The first one I saw in the theater was Beneath the Planet of the Apes, which really creeped me out (but in a good way). I pretty much learned to read through comic books. My father bought me Iron Man comics. My mom knew I liked monsters, so she bought me Werewolf by Night and Tomb of Dracula.

My fourth grade teacher gave our class the assignment of putting together a literary magazine. I decided to write a story about a lonely little boy, his scientist father, and the thirty-foot-long mechanical Tyrannosaurus Rex the father builds as a pal for his son. Of course, the father gets kidnapped by gangsters who want to use ol’ Tyran for a bank heist, and the little boy and his mechanical pal have to go to the rescue. I’ll never forget standing in line at the school cafeteria and having this whole story play out visually in my head like a movie on an internal screen.

I wrote that first story when I was eight. When Fat White Vampire Blues came out in 2003, I was thirty-eight. There’s a thirty year apprenticeship in there. For my bar mitzvah and received oodles of gift certificates from my local Waldenbooks. I spent my gift certificates on Silverberg books, Anne McCaffrey’s “Dragons of Pern” novels, and John Clute’s wonderful Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, which provided me with an inexhaustible reading list. Three close buddies and I worked on a fanzine, The Dragon Reader, that started out as an homage to Anne McCaffrey’s books but took so long to pull together — almost three years — that it ended up having nothing to do with Anne or Pern or dragons. We took fifty copies to Noreascon 2, the 1980 Worldcon in Boston, hoping to sell them and recoup our printing costs. We gave away half and brought the rest home. Years later, in 1994, I took a course at the University of New Orleans Metropolitan College called “World Building: Writing Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror,” taught by award-winning SF writer George Alec Effinger. I joined George’s writing critique group after finishing his class, and I workshopped my first genre novel, Fire on Iron. The next book I wrote was Fat White Vampire Blues, which my workshop group loved and which I was able to sell to Del Rey/Ballantine Books in 2002. They published it in 2003, along with its sequel, Bride of the Fat White Vampire, in 2004.

Fat White Vampire Blues has been compared to John Kennedy Toole’s classic A Confederacy of Dunces–especially its overweight and overwrought hero, Ignatius O’Reilly. Was Ignatius the inspiration for your hefty vampire hero, Jules?

One really can’t set out to write a sprawling, slapstick, comic picturesque set in New Orleans without confronting the gargantuan shadow of Ignatius O’Reilly. Ignatius has become part of New Orleans’s DNA, almost as much as Louis Armstrong has. Confederacy has been one of my favorite books for years–I don’t think any American novel has ever deployed better comic dialogue–so when the notion occurred to me to write a book about the trials and tribulations of an obese vampire in New Orleans, naturally my thoughts turned to the original Oliver Hardy of New Orleans literature. I didn’t want to make Jules a “vampire Ignatius”–not only wasn’t that my vision of Jules’s personality, but to try to do so and do John Kennedy Toole’s creation justice was, I felt, beyond my reach. What I did want to evoke was the spirit of Toole’s novel and Toole’s New Orleans . . . that peculiar combination of self-centeredness, inflated self-regard, and a nagging sense of inferiority and failure that Toole portrayed as being emblematic of New Orleans (a portrayal which I think hits close to the bull’s-eye). The typical New Orleans native (if there is such as thing) will spend hours listing the horrendous failings of his hometown, but he wouldn’t live anywhere else. And if anyone from the outside dares to deride New Orleans in comparison with, say, Houston, that same New Orleanian who was previously so down on his home will spring fiercely to the Big Easy’s defense with the passion of Arthur protecting Camelot.

Admittedly, Jules and Ignatius share numerous personality traits: slothfulness; a reverence for home and all things connected with home; devotion to traditional religion; living in their mothers’ homes and shadows; and, above all, a bullheaded assurance that their way is the right way. But Ignatius has a vocabulary, education, and, most likely, an I.Q. far beyond Jules’s, and if they ever met, he’d probably consider Jules the sort of uncouth, ignorant lout Ignatius’s mother would enjoy having a beer with. Jules, on the other hand, would deride Ignatius as a pointy-headed intellectual, almost as stuck up as the aristocratic vampires of the High Krewe of Vlad Tepes . . . but he would certainly consider Ignatius a tempting meal.

Where to find Andrew Fox online

Website: http://www.fantasticalandrewfox.com
Facebook: Facebook profile
Blog: http://www.fantasticalandrewfox.com

Series

Hazardous Imaginings by Andrew Fox

Science fiction is NOT a safe space! These are anthologies and collections of stories and short novels from around the world that push the boundaries of taboo in science fiction. Dynamic, unfettered, uncensored, and at the cutting edge of speculative fiction. Free thought for forward thinkers. Science fiction that fulfills the promise of a literature that provides readers with a telescopic view of the potential wonders -- and catastrophes -- that may lie ahead.

Hazardous Imaginings: The Mondo Book of Politically Incorrect Science Fiction

Price: $4.99 USD.

The August Micholson Chronicles by Andrew Fox

Civil War steampunk suspense! Lieutenant Commander August Micholson lost his first ship in reckless battle. Now he's offered a chance to redeem himself: he can take the ironclad gunboat USS James B. Eads on an undercover mission to destroy a hidden rebel boatyard and prevent the Confederates from building a fleet of ironclads that will dominate the Mississippi. But dangers far more sinister than rebel ironclads await Micholson and his crew. Micholson is faced with a terrible choice: he can risk the fiery immolation of every American, both Union and Confederate, or he can risk his soul by merging it with that of his greatest enemy and that enemy's elemental fire demon... and then find himself changed into something more than merely human. Join August Micholson on his hazardous, fabulous journeys through a strangely changed North America and an alternative Civil War!

Fire on Iron

Price: $4.99 USD.

Books

The Bad Luck Spirits' Social Aid and Pleasure Club by Andrew Fox

Price: $5.99 USD. Words: 136,570. Language: English. Published: February 16, 2021 . Categories: Fiction » Fantasy » Contemporary, Fiction » Horror » Occult

The Miasma Club, a gathering of bad luck spirits, conspires to drive out the human population of New Orleans by conjuring a massive hurricane, then hobbling governmental response. Who knew it was so easy to destroy the Big Easy? Only a lone traitor, Jewish evil eye spirit Kay Rosenblatt, seeks to save the city. Set in the world of Fat White Vampire Blues.

Hazardous Imaginings: The Mondo Book of Politically Incorrect Science Fiction by Andrew Fox

Series: Hazardous Imaginings. Price: $4.99 USD. Words: 113,550. Language: English. Published: October 13, 2020 . Categories: Fiction » Science fiction » Short stories, Fiction » Science fiction » Utopias & dystopias

Science fiction is NOT a safe space! Two short novels and three stories by the author of Fat White Vampire Blues push the boundaries of taboo in science fiction. “Remarkable work in an incendiary time. The Truest Quill.” —Barry N. Malzberg

The Man Who Would Be Kong: a Story by Andrew Fox

Price: Free! Words: 10,080. Language: English. Published: October 12, 2020 . Categories: Fiction » Fantasy » Contemporary, Fiction » Science fiction » Short stories

An elderly man, Max Strauss, retired in Miami Beach, visits an entrepreneur who is about to open a King Kong-themed restaurant. Max claims to have portrayed the giant gorilla in the 1933 classic film. But everyone knows that King Kong was actually an 18" tall animated model, don't they? So is Max an attention-seeking fraud? Or is he something far greater?

Fire on Iron by Andrew Fox

Series: The August Micholson Chronicles. Price: $4.99 USD. Words: 86,740. Language: English. Published: November 17, 2013 . Categories: Fiction » Science fiction » Steampunk & retropunk, Fiction » Fantasy » Historical

Civil War steampunk supernatural suspense! USN Commander Micholson lost his ship but is given a chance to redeem himself: an undercover mission to destroy a hidden rebel boat yard. Encountering an arcane plot of African fire spirits to annihilate Federal armies, he is faced with a choice of risking the lives of all or merging with a demon…

Andrew Fox's tag cloud

3d animation alternate history animation australian sf black folklore civil war comedy horror comic fantasy dark fantasy dystopia fantasy demons fantasy female fat white vampire series future crime future noir intersectionality irish folklore ironclads jewish folklore king kong literary fantasy miami beach movies naval fiction new collection new orleans science fiction collection sf collection slipstream steampunk stop motion animation taboo stories the holocaust urban fantasy