An Interview with Juan Martinez, Author of "Extended Stay"

Juan Martinez is an English professor at Northwestern University and the author of the short story collection Best Worst American as well as the Weird fiction work Extended Stay, his debut novel, which tackles themes such as undocumented Latinx experiences in the USA and living and working conditions under capitalism.

Extended Stay was published in January 2023 by University of Arizona Press.

I'm very grateful to have a chance to chat with him about his work.

Your lead character, Alvaro, flees his native Colombia and finds himself in Las Vegas, working in a seedy hotel named The Alicia, doing his best to make a living and take care of his sister Carmen. As opposed to the general stereotype of the financially poor immigrant, Alvaro has what I personally perceived as a petty bourgeois, upper middle-class background, and that displays the multifacetedness of individual immigration stories, the situation in homelands in addition to the situation in the emigrated country.

Why did you make that choice, why not make Alvaro financially poor from the beginning and what does that background add to his character arc?

This is such a perceptive question, and one that gets at two things that motivated the novel. One’s the one you already pointed out: I really wanted to talk about the various kinds of immigration experiences that people go through, and the very real sense that any single person who ends up having to leave their place of origin has this sort of secret, unique narrative---and that everyone just assumes that they already know it. That’s definitely up there. The second motivation, though, is that Alvaro’s background mirrors my own, and I was struck by how lucky we were as a family to avert some of the worst upheavals when we lived in Colombia. We came close to disaster, to all kinds of tragedy, but we got lucky. So Extended Stay functions as this deeply personal alternate history.

Many encounters, occurrences in Extended Stay work on at least two layers, literal and metaphorical. While the symbolic value of certain elements is pretty obvious, for instance the Alicia almost certainly standing for the USA, (almost certain, but feel free to correct me if not) others aren't as clear-cut; like the ghost Esther(s), the twins Lost and Found, both of which, by the way, give the story a weird, almost psychedelic “Alice in Wonderland in neon colors” kind of vibe.

To what extent was it your intent to create metaphoric situations which can and should be interpreted in a certain fixed way, and to what degree does the story give the freedom to elucidate according to personal experience and perception?

There’s this moment in a preface to Kafka’s stories where the writer John Updike refers to the Kafkian as a world of broken symbols: you know that a weird image or moment stands for… something. It’s just not at all clear what that something is---even if there’s a general sense of suggestiveness as to where the metaphor is going. I love that way of thinking about metaphor, and I think that deep down that’s where I land on Extended Stay’s weirder, psychedelic stretches. Like, ultimately, so much of living in a global late-capitalist world---a place where everyone feels like they’re being exploited even as they themselves may be exploiting others---feels so slippery and disquieting and unsettling that these broken symbols make sense on an emotional level, all while hinting at a real attempt to figure out where we are and how we got here.

While reading, I pondered and wondered a lot on the nature of the hotel Alicia and the face beneath the face. The book is tagged as “Lovecraftian”, and Alicia being a sort of sea monster that awakens from a slumber and the existential horror would speak for that categorization. Could you elaborate other influences and models in whose image Alicia was created? How would you classify your own horror writing?

There are lots of horror writers name-checked and thanked at acknowledgements at the end, plus some filmmakers. I don’t think I ever would have written in this vein had it not been for Peter Straub or Thomas Ligotti, or for David Cronenberg or David Lynch for that matter. But there’s also, like, a substrata of work that I never realized was there until long after I sent the novel out, some of it horror, some horror-adjacent. I know there’s a lot of Philip K. Dick in there, particularly during the latter third. I also realized, much later, how much of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman and Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo stuck themselves into the novel. Oh, shoot! One more---a movie that I watched and rewatched when I was a graduate student in Las Vegas! Herk Harvey’s astounding Carnival of Souls. Have you seen it?* It’s astounding and gorgeous and makes amazing use of this abandoned carnival in the middle of Utah, but it was that particular ungodly combination---desert and decrepit structures and water where you shouldn’t expect water---that stuck with me, years later. All of that plus a protagonist in pursuit by dark forces, much like Alvaro.

How was the reception of Extended Stay in the USA and do you see your book mirroring a situation exclusive to America? Do you think there can be parallels between your book and, for instance, the immigration to Europe over the Mediterranean Sea, during which thousands of people die yearly and who need to work under precarious conditions to survive? Or even more global occurrences?

I’ve been so grateful that Extended Stay has found an audience in the USA. It does feel like people get what it’s trying to say, and I hope to speak to all kinds of immigrant experiences---that people go through enormous physical and emotional peril to make this journey, and that they’re doing it not just out self-preservation but because of siblings or children or parents or family. It’s an enormous sacrifice. And it is horrific. And the possibility of things being better is never assured, and yet they’re willing to do it because there are no other options. I do hope it speaks to all that. But I’m also excited for young writers to start writing their own takes on those stories, like lots more cool global horror from everywhere.

Why is the Alicia set in Las Vegas and not any other American region, like in any Suburbia, or New York City, or even LA?

I lived in Las Vegas for 6 years when I was getting my doctorate: I do love the city and I do think there things about it that lend themselves to metaphorical richness (the boom and bust cycle of people who go to casinos, of course, and the promise of easy money, and the whole thing of building and developing in places where nature clearly doesn’t think we should be), but the most honest answer is that it was the city I was left with. The moment I moved was the moment where I realized I needed to write about it. I needed to process what I had just gone through.

If you could compile a soundtrack for Extended Stay, what genre(s) would be included?

There’s Esther’s hymn, “Abide with Me,” that courses through it, but I’d add some of Alvaro’s favorite Rock en Español folk: Soda Stereo and Fobia, for sure, plus some of my own favorite singer-songwriters that talk about where the human meets the animal, Neko Case in particular.

Do you have any upcoming book projects we can anticipate?

I’m finishing up a new story collection! (There are stories coming out in a number of really cool places super soon, including one super creepy one in The Chicago Quarterly Review and one out later in April in The Sunday Morning Transport. Plus another one in the summer.) And I’m working on a very short folk-horror novel---I can’t say too much about it because it’s still very much in flux, but there’s definitely some Colombian history in there as well as some Etruscan human sacrifices, plus cool stuff about a very real place in Italy that I’m obsessed with. It’s all of that but, unlike Extended Stay, it’s also primarily comic. Kind of a Wicker Man, kind of Grady Hendrix-ish, but also very much its own weird funny thing.

Is there anything else you’d like to add to this interview?

I just wanted to thank you so much for reaching out, and for reading the novel, and for being such a champion of the genre. I know I’ve said this to you privately, but I’d like to say it publicly: It’s been so cool to discover so many new works of horror through you and through your blog. Thank you!

I can't thank you enough for your kind words and for accepting this interview for Protean Depravity, it was a great pleasure reading your very important and wonderful work as well talking to you!

Thank you!!!

*I haven't seen Carnival of Souls, but thanks to your recommendation I know what to watch next!