These Extremists Don’t Come Out of Nowhere: An Interview with Austin Ross, author of Gloria Patri
“Gloria Patri (holy shit, man)” is the subject line of the first email I ever sent to Austin Ross, author of the crackling paranoid thriller of a novel Gloria Patri. The book had been handed to me by a writer/editor friend. I read it in a few days and handed off to another editor/writer friend. It’s that kind of book, wise and beautifully written, carefully structured (as you can see below), and painfully prescient in its depiction of the kinds of tensions that can send young people down the rabbit hole of political extremism and domestic terrorism. We should all wish that this book, published two years ago, was no longer as painfully relevant today as it was then, but that is very much not the case. Holy shit, man. I emailed with Austin about the book, its circuitous path to publication, the unusual but ancient structure he used, how bad querying agents sucks, January 6, and more.
Barrelhouse: I usually start these interviews the same way: since a lot of our readers are writers themselves, can you tell us a bit about the book’s path to publication?
Austin Ross: I had been writing different versions of this for a long time, probably about twenty years or so. It looked quite different during that time, and each attempt ultimately failed. I’d get maybe twenty- or thirty-thousand words in and realize it wasn’t working or I needed to rethink some of it and then put it aside for a while before attempting it again. There are certain elements of part of the book that are semi-autobiographical, or inspired by some parts of my own childhood, etc., but I don’t know that I was able to fully realize what this novel wanted to be until in 2019, I came up with the idea of combining the story of this isolated family with the story of someone falling into the gravity of an extremist militia group. The Proud Boys and other groups like that had been around for a while before then but were just beginning to break through into the public consciousness, and it seemed like a natural progression for the characters. When those two ideas combined, the novel came together very quickly, and I wrote it in about a year, finishing in the summer of 2020. Then came the usual process of querying, and the book received a number of really great comments from agents—one in particular wanted me to cut a section that I consider to be the heart of the book. It was a difficult decision but I went with my gut and declined, since removing or significantly changing that section of the book would mean it was no longer the book I had set out to write. After a few years of querying, Alan Good at Malarkey Books offered me a deal and I decided to sign with him, and here we are.
BH: Thanks so much for sharing that! Do you mind talking a bit more about the section the agent wanted you to cut? What were they thinking that would accomplish? Why does it feel like the heart of the book to you?
AR: Not at all! There's a lengthy(ish) section in the middle that's sort of a flashback. I knew that could be problematic going in (flashbacks tend to be polarizing), but that whole section of the family on the farm was why I started writing this book in the first place. And the book is structured sort of like a chiasm, which isn't something you really hear about these days - ancient texts would use this structure system, where the first and last points mirrored each other, the second and second-to-last points mirrored each other, and so on, so if you were to diagram it it would look something like this:
A
B
C
D
C
B
A
Instead of the main point being at the end, and everything building up toward it, the main point was in the center of the piece and everything else would support it or echo it, etc. Biblical writings use this a lot, and it intrigued me as a way to structure the book given what it's about. Gloria Patri doesn't quite fit that structure exactly but the family flashback section is more or less right in the middle, and is really central to the book - that these extremists don't come out of nowhere, that there's a whole system of thought that can (though obviously not always) lead or trend in that direction.
Anyway, this particular agent wanted me to cut that entire section of the book and just focus on the current timeline of Solomon, et al. I see the argument for that and how it could make it a more commercial book but I also think it would make it less honest, which I wasn't interested in. I wanted to explore HOW we got to this particular historical moment, rather than just make it into some sort of potboiler.
BH: I haven’t written many books that I thought might be interesting to agents, but on the few occasions when I have, I’ve found that process to be the worst part of the entire writing/submitting/publishing/not-publishing experience. Granted, I have never successfully completed that process, but there’s something about it that is just the worst. Two years of that is a long time! How did it feel for you when you were in that process? Assuming that eventually you wound up expanding to small/medium presses, how long did that take you and what was the thinking there? I realize I’m making some assumptions about your process and how it might feel for you based on my own, so please also correct me where I’m wrong or not quite right there as well.
AR: Querying is the weirdest thing. This was the strangest period of my writing life, to be honest. The real impetus to write the book came when I was at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference - I had a pitch meeting with an agent there and he was really excited about it, even read one of my short stories and emailed me to say how much he loved it. (I wrote about this whole experience for Publishers Weekly and some other places, so sorry if you've heard this before.) Then I was like, oh shit, now I have to finish this novel. But then when I sent it to him and he said he was looking forward to reading it, I never heard from him again and was pretty despondent. Had I really written something so god awful that he couldn't even bring himself to respond to my follow-ups?
So it took some time before I queried anyone else, but eventually picked it back up, and at a certain point I was wondering if this would ever see the light of day or if it really was so awful no one wanted it. Eventually I started submitting to presses and not just agents, and Alan Good at Malarkey really believed in it. They put out really great books, so I decided to go with them.
BH: How much research did you do for the book? I’m thinking mostly about the sections in Baghdad, which really stuck with me – they’re so hot and uncomfortable and terrible things seem to just happen as a matter of course – and the House CORE part, which is when Andrew rejoins his military buddy Big Boy, who is forming a militia.
AR: There was a good amount of research that went into it, particularly the parts you mentioned. I've never been in the military and have not been part of a militia, so that took a mixture of research and imagination. Phil Klay’s Redeployment was something I read around that time. There was a book I read by a combat soldier in Iraq that I am unfortunately forgetting the name of, but which gave me a lot of fascinating details about life in Baghdad at that time. I also knew I didn't want that section to be too long, both for narrative reasons but also because I didn't think I could pull it off convincingly for a longer stretch of the book, so I confined it to I think one or two chapters.
For the militia stuff, I read a ton about a number of incidents around the country: stuff like Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Oregon standoff, etc. Reading all of that was helpful for a number of reasons - these groups tend to operate in very similar ways, but it also gave a clear 30,000-foot view of this narrative of a certain part of American life. You can trace what's happening today all the way back to Waco, and beyond that, to things like the Tulsa Race Massacre, to the Civil War, to even this country’s founding. These things have built on each other over time and they tend to erupt at certain points in our history. And the idea of the abandoned missile silo being their home base actually came from a documentary I watched about this huge LSD manufacturing bust the FBI pulled off - this group had found and set up shop in an abandoned missile silo in I think Kansas. That setting immediately fascinated me so I stole it for the novel.
BH: This is maybe a weird question, as someone who has spent a lot of time delving into that world of militias and angry young white men, how did January 6 feel to you?
AR: Not weird at all! My wife and I had actually just started packing for our move when January 6 happened - we used to live near Philadelphia and then moved to the DC area for work. I remember watching the events unfold and being both surprised and not surprised at the same time. January 6 was a natural result of a lot of these ideologies - there is a mix of different ideologies but they are united in their hatred of the government and their belief that (to quote the Bible by way of Flannery O’Connor), “the violent bear it away,” although a more common translation would be “the violent take it by force.” For a lot of these people, America is often equated with God's kingdom on earth, so serving the interests of America is worth whatever violence it may require. Combine this view of an angry, jealous God with a deeply held fear of hell as eternal conscious torment and that is a powerful mix that leads to a lot of what we have seen. I think a lot of people are afraid of God and afraid of what God might do to their loved ones, and they channel that fear into anger - we'll force everyone else to follow our rules because that makes us feel better. Ultimately, I think looking back I was still a bit naive in thinking that these people would be held accountable. Their pardons will only embolden them.
BH: Are you working on anything now?
AR: I'm working on a new novel - another literary thriller that is about a missing person, the FBI, cults (because of course), and has a lot more supernatural or supernatural-adjacent elements than Gloria Patri. For example: People think the dead are being raised, but are they actually? I used to write a lot more in that slipstream/genreish space and it's been fun to get back into something more along those lines.
BH: What’s your favorite Patrick Swayze movie?
AR: I haven't seen a ton! I know my wife introduced me to Dirty Dancing when we were first dating. I remember watching Tall Tale when I was a kid, but that is far from his greatest cinematic achievement. That honestly might be it apart from my favorite, a movie that blew my mind when I saw it as a teenager: Donnie Darko. I haven't seen it in years (I'm a little scared to revisit it and find out it sucks) but I loved the vibes of it and that supernatural-adjacent idea again, of hinting at this other world that may or may not exist.
Austin Ross is the author of Gloria Patri. His fiction and essays have appeared in Publishers Weekly, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. For more, visit austinrossauthor.com.