The Bay Area has long been a locus for Joshua Mohr’s (Model Citizen) imagination. Saint the Terrifying is the first in an inventive three-part saga that follows that trajectory, but also swirls in a more far-flung locale. Blending a hard-boiled detective novel of West Oakland with Viking lore, it kicks off when a local punk band’s gear disappears.
Saint, a one-eyed ex-con with a glass eye who plays guitar in a lesser punk band, begins to investigate the loss. Along the way, he becomes involved with a host of brightly idiosyncratic characters on the margins, including the other band’s sledgehammer-wielding lead singer, Trick Wilma, at various points described as a Valkyrie. She brings Saint into her band, a move that amps up the narrative tension—Saint broke the hand of Got Jokes, one of her bandmates, that morning. “I love confined spaces with people that shouldn’t be in the room together,” Mohr says. He formerly lived in San Francisco, but he speaks to me over Zoom from his office in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle.
The novel slips back and forth in time, delving into Saint’s childhood with his alcoholic mother and his vividly drawn father, Tron, a manic glassblower in Norway who had Saint learn to fight by sparring with a bear. Tron tells him, “Let the others rot in the rack, while we attack this day on a bloodthirsty quest for joy.” Mohr’s pages are full of fabulist flourishes in this vein. A swallowed glass eyeball. Jars full of songs at the grocery store, some of which the protagonist will write. Chattering glass birds that show in galleries around the world that “looked frozen in flight, soaring at speed”—these are made by Tron, who urges a punk-rock approach to making art, during what Mohr offhandedly calls “the death rattle” of late capitalism. Tron writes his entire memoir only to burn it again and again.
But the core of the book is the quirky love story between Saint and Trick Wilma, in which Saint’s masked vulnerability, shaped by his unreliable mother and forceful artist-father, comes up against, or perhaps is in a slant kind of concert with, Trick Wilma’s toughness.
When Mohr and I talk, he's been finishing up line edits for the second installment of the saga, The Wolf Wants Answers, which is scheduled to publish in June. He mentions that part of his process is to read Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse before making line edits so that he can remind himself what sentences should sound like. He writes his best between midnight and 5 a.m., the time, he says, “when I am at my best—like when I’m sort of lost in the wild of the book is when I’m the most openhearted, when I’m the most open-eared, where I feel like, from a frequency perspective, that I’m the most tuned in to what’s going on around me when I’m line editing.”
Saint began as a short story about the character giving his glass eyeball to a junkie; surprisingly, the story was for an anthology about Taylor Swift. When Mohr got to the end of the short story, which later became the opening of Saint the Terrifying, however, Saint didn’t stop talking to him. “I was like, I want to keep going with this cat,” he says.
Mohr took his daughter to the National Nordic Museum in Seattle because she was curious about the Norwegian side of their ancestry. As he walked around the room, he noticed opulent blown-glass birds. Mesmerized by them, he began researching the guy who made them. And as he left the museum, Mohr bought a book of old Viking sagas to pass the time, but he became fascinated by the liberty taken by the storyteller to “include every genre that they wanted to include. So these sagas were family stories and love stories and fantasy and horror and surrealism.” He thought, “I could do that if I call my thing a saga. Does that mean that I get to play in all these sandboxes at the same time, too?” The term became a “permission slip” to blend genres.
Once he had the first book, Mohr realized the project was bigger than he’d initially conceptualized—he was “looking down the barrel of a 1,000-page Viking saga,” he explains. As a cinephile, he thought about Coppola’s decision to put together the Godfather trilogy so the second one had a long, beautiful flashback of De Niro playing Vito Corleone, and considered writing the saga as a trilogy with those sorts of flashbacks.
But Mohr didn’t write the other two books before pitching the project to Chris Heiser, the publisher at Unnamed Press. When they spoke, Mohr proposed just one book released per year; it was Heiser who suggested that all three of the books be released over the course of a year. Mohr was up for a challenge. He explains to me, “I know I can write one book at a time. There’s no proof I can pull this off. And to me, that’s a really exciting place to be. Just like, what if I completely fucked this up?”
The style of Saint the Terrifying is extravagant and interesting, sometimes rough, playfully dissonant, full of velocity. Mohr calls it “broken baroque.” Of Saint’s “robust, swaggering sentences,” Mohr says that he was looking at “How can you celebrate the cadence, sort of the peculiar music, not in terms of the punk rock, but in terms of the peculiar music of the human heart?” The prose, he notes, “intentionally disintegrates” in connection with a fictional scene set during the real-life Ghost Ship warehouse fire of 2016, in which a punk house in East Oakland burned down.
And in keeping with a punk ethos for the sentences, Mohr says, he preserved mistakes and messiness in his own writing. He’d taught a course about the sentence, and one session focused on what he calls “the grammar malfunction,” which related to his technique here. He says, “It was really interesting to watch people kind of give themselves permission to say, like, OK, I know The Elements of Style. I know what the rules of the road are, but what if I choose to sort of intentionally dislocate from that? And it was really cool to watch all of these lights go on, like, Oh, my god, I can do that.”
“That was what I loved about punk rock: It blocked off all the phantoms screaming in my head,” Saint says at one point in the novel. In other words, it’s a form that’s all-consuming. Mohr explains, “I’ve been writing about the Bay Area my entire career, but from a subculture standpoint, I’ve really never stuck my teeth into this sort of punk-rock kingdom that I know really well.” As part of character exploration, he wrote the songs that he believed Saint would write (those songs were recorded and pressed into a limited-edition blue vinyl).
And among Mohr’s novels, Saint the Terrifying feels especially intimate. He notes, “I love when I can feel like a character is telling me a secret.” The book is confiding, full of direct addresses from Saint to the reader. Mohr explains, “I love Lars von Trier’s idea that a good work of art should leave open the avenues of interpretation. So I was thinking about that a lot with Saint, just to make sure that I’m not chewing anybody’s food. To leave that job to the readers. The task is to be really cognizant of the fact that a book is sort of just hibernating until a reader brings it to life with her imagination.”
Attentive to the problems going on in the world, and reacting a bit to his more business-oriented experience of publishing Model Citizen, Mohr wrote as if Saint the Terrifying and its brethren were his last books. “Like, if you’re paying attention to what’s happening in the world, you know, how are you not doing exactly what you want to be doing?” he asks. “I was really writing this from the perspective of, If this is the coup de grâce, how do I want to go out? I want to go out in a Viking punk rocker blaze of glory.”•
Anita Felicelli is Alta Journal ’s books editor and the author of How We Know Our Time Travelers, Chimerica, and Love Songs for a Lost Continent.
