Kiss Me, Stranger Press Room
Urbanite Magazine review
Connotation Press interviews Ron
Review in Charm City Current
YA Appeal of Kiss Me Stranger
WYPR radio: "The Signal" interviews Ron
Sun literary blog review
City Paper book review
WYPR's Maryland Morning
Foreword magazine review
School Library Journal review
Interview in the Nervous Breakdown
Large Hearted Boy "book notes" feature -- a soundtrack to Kiss Me, Stranger
Interview conducted by Brad Grochowski, the Indiebookman -- about guerilla marketing
JMWW interview with Ron
Ron on Read Street, Baltimore SUN literary blog
Ron at the Lighthouse Writers Blog
Ig Publishing Interviews Ron
Urbanite Magazine, June 2011
Utopian Dystopia
by Rebecca Messner
In Ron Tanner's illustrated novel, Kiss Me Stranger, chaos abounds. A dictator has left his capital city in ruins. The militias fighting a civil war are so disorganized, they often forget which side they're fighting for. Starving citizens forage for metal scraps that they trade in for Presidential Toffee (the dictator's favorite) or concentrated Presidential Cheese Food. When the novel opens, our heroine, Penelope, mother of fourteen, grates wood into her children's stew like it's hard cheese in an effort to fill their stomachs.
The novel's situation is unbelievable enough to stay light and funny (the dictator, who demands to be called "The Man," is so enamored of Gregory Peck that he remakes To Kill A Mockingbird, casts himself as Atticus Finch, and mandates that every child in school must memorize his lines), even as everyone starves and freezes and scavenges barbarically. Yet it's also not entirely inconceivable. "Authoritarianism is absurd," says Tanner, a self-proclaimed pacifist. "When I read passages of The Man, I think of Muammar el-Qaddafi."
Tanner's characters keep the book on this side of totally ludicrous. Penelope, our immensely sympathetic narrator, is burdened with the care of her many children, whom she admits she never quite planned to have yet loves more than she can stand. Marcel, her husband, off fighting for the Presidential Militia, moves with the unflinching goal of finding his way back to his family. The children, who act more like a blabbering pack than individuals, offer comic relief and display an uncanny propensity to stick together. (They are also the artists behind the book's charming illustrations.) Only Lon, the couple's oldest son and a soldier for the Revolutionary Militia, seems lost, in large part because he's decided to stray from the pack.
It's no surprise to learn that Tanner wrote Kiss Me, Stranger in the middle of a painful divorce. The novel's family is the one element of constant good amidst a world that is otherwise crumbling, which Tanner hopes will leave people optimistic. "If [the family] can act humanely, in a very loving way, in the novel's world, I'd like to think people can do that in the real world, too."
Foreword Magazine, Feb. 2011
Post-apocalyptic fiction, once solely the purview of science fiction and best exemplified by novels such as Earth Abides, A Canticle for Leibowitz, and Alas, Babylon, began moving toward mainstream fiction with the publication in 1980 of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. Cormac McCarthy continued mainstream use of the setting in The Road, as did Margaret Atwood in Oryx and Crake. Award-winning writer Ron Tanner ventures into this field with a slim novel that shimmers with imagery both verbal and visual. Tanner’s illustrations are apt comments on runaway consumerism, the foibles of warfare, and totalitarian government in the guise of the local civil servants.
During an unnamed country’s civil war, one family struggles to keep itself together while two of its men are fighting on opposing sides. Penelope and Marcel love each other and their 14 children, but times are very tough: they and their neighbors must scavenge for metal to “contribute” to the Presidential Militia for arms and other items in the war effort. The seemingly endless conflict has nearly stripped the surrounding land bare of trees and edible plants, so scavenging for salable or trade-worthy items is vital to staying alive.
The Revolutionary Militia’s leaders seek to overthrow the President and his cabinet and install themselves in their places. The local Presidential Militia representative, Alexander—whom Penelope’s children gleefully call “the Metal Man” and whom Penelope calls Hermes because that’s the name on his shirt—takes his job a little too seriously. During a stop at her house to pick up the required metals that Penelope and her children have scavenged, Alexander insists that she hasn’t handed over enough metal scrap; he’s got his eye on her oven racks. Unable to stomach his smarmy attitude, she slaps him, gets arrested, and escapes to run off with her children to a nearby landfill, frightened that Alexander will find and arrest her again.
The landfill provides the most meager of livelihoods for all who live there. Penelope and her children must do the best they can in their new “home.” Eventually the war winds down, and Penelope waits in hope that her husband and eldest son will return safe and whole from their wartime experiences. Life is uncertain for all of her family; the only sure thing for them is change, whether they want it or not.
Throughout Kiss Me, Stranger the the hardships of life are seen through the veil of familial love and loyalty. Penelope and her children have no TV or videogames or cars or new toys, so they tell stories and sing songs to each other for entertainment. This “reversion” to earlier pastimes softens the bleak existence the characters endure in this story. Tanner uses satire and humor in balanced amounts to convey the irritating nature of bureaucracies as well as the humanity of even the most avoided government official.
Brightly bleak and utterly human, Kiss Me, Stranger is a sort of picture book for adults. It brings home how much our modern world takes for granted, and how some of us might cope when all that “stuff” is taken away.
(February) J.G. STINSON
The Lighthouse Writers Top-Secret Blog
All the latest news, ideas, and opinions from Denver's Independent Creative Writing Program.
I read my first post-apocalyptic, dystopian novel that’s actually kind of lighthearted and fun. Ron Tanner’s a terrific writer, and his novel, Kiss Me, Stranger, is unlike any I’ve ever read before. It’s not exactly a graphic novel, but there are plenty of hand-drawn illustrations throughout, some of them with a pop art feel. The story itself is a loose retelling of the Odyssey, only from an uber-woman Penelope point of view. Her dreams become our access point to other POVs, such as her husband’s and son’s, both off fighting in an obliterating civil war. (The novel’s setting is a country built on a landfill–not typically the stuff of fun and humor.) ”Love sneaked up on me,” Penelope tells us, early in the novel, “it threw a hood over my head and kidnapped me.”
This combination of dark and light keeps the novel in its own jaunty cloud, and it does so without compromising our belief in the world of brutal scavengers, trash-as-earth, and dictators who resemble Gregory Peck. By the end of the novel, we feel our perspective on our own times slighly altered. Unlike immersing yourself in, say, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the feeling of alarm is not soul-crushing. Reading Tanner’s Kiss Me, Stranger will affect your dreams (and sorry, youngest daughter, they’re kind of creepy, twisted dreams), but it may also broaden your sense of hope.
Andrea Dupree
IG Publishing Talks to Ron about Kiss Me, Stranger
IG: Your novel -- Kiss Me, Stranger -- is being marketed as “an illustrated novel.” That’s not the same as a graphic novel, is it?
Ron Right, it’s different. Traditionally, readers associated illustrations with children’s books, but that perception is changing. Kiss Me, Stranger has more than 50 illustrations, so it’s not a traditional novel. But it’s not a graphic novel either. It’s a hybrid.
IG: Why do it that way?
Ron I wanted to capture the childish wonder and otherworldly point of view of the novel’s fourteen children. Doing illustrations – which are supposed to have been drawn by these children – really spins the story in a whimsical way. I had a lot of fun with the drawings.
IG: Are you a trained artist?
Ron I’m a doodler. When I was a kid, I wanted to be an illustrator and I took art lessons but turned away from all of that when I discovered I was better at writing.
IG: Kiss Me, Stranger has been called “speculative eco-fiction” and an “amazing amalgam” and a book that “reads like some wonderfully disturbed bastard child of Vonnegut and Orwell,” among other things. How would you describe it?
Ron I love what these readers have said about it. And I should point out that some find it funny while others find it scary. I’d like readers to think it’s both.
IG: What’s funny and what’s scary about it as far as you’re concerned?
Ron What’s funny is the lengths that we – that is, humanity – will go to get what we want. Greed, for instance, is appalling but also tragically funny. Megalomania is absurdly funny. The president of my fictional country is a megalomaniac.
IG: The guy who re-made To Kill A Mockingbird, the movie, “with new dialogue he wrote himself”?
Ron That’s right. The guy with the world’s largest snow globe collection. He’s funny. And scary.
IG: The national car, which he invented -- it’s three cylinders and breaks down all the time -- what’s it called?
Ron The Minotaur. That’s funny too.
IG: Okay, back to the previous question: how would you describe this book?
Ron It’s speculative in that there’s no fixed time or place for this little nation built on landfill. The story could be now, it could be a few years from now, but it’s mostly recognizable and not too far away in either direction. My eldest brother was really upset by this because he couldn’t pin it down. But that’s the point. The minute you pin it down, you kind of ruin it – like putting a firefly in a jar.
IG: Would you call it dystopian or post-apocalyptic? Didn’t Madison Smartt Bell place it on a continuum, somewhere between Ridley Walker and The Road?
Ron I’m flattered that he’d say so, but it’s not nearly as dark as those books. And it’s not post-apocalyptic. It’s about a civil war and the end of a repressive regime, not the end of the world. In that way, it has a positive spin.
IG: But there are some ugly things in the novel, true?
Ron True. There has to be some ugliness. It’s an anti-war book.
IG: Do I hear you saying that readers can expect a happy ending?
Ron A “postive spin” doesn’t mean a happy ending. It means that we see how we might hold ourselves together and maybe even prevail, despite the many forces that are arrayed against us,
IG: That raises the million-dollar question: how did this book begin?
Ron I’ve been toying with this fictional country for a long time -- ever since I was in graduate school.
IG: You mean Iowa?
Ron Yeah, I wrote a story there called “The Last Draft” and it was the kernel for a story I wrote years later called “The Red Shoes,” which I published in the Iowa Review. I had so much fun with that story, making up this world and seeing how my character might survive, I decided to write another.
IG: So then you wrote a series of stories that took place in this fictional country?
Ron Not right away. Actually, I wrote the first six chapters when I was getting a divorce and living in a seedy sublet.
IG: Seriously?
Ron Seriously. I was in a really bad way – I’ll spare you the sordid details. Suffice it to say, these stories just kept coming and they were a great relief. I really liked the point of view of the mother with fourteen children, how she had to protect and feed her family while her husband was fighting on the front.
IG: So, in a way, this novel is about divorce?
Ron You could say that. It’s about trying to hold things together when the world is crashing in around you.
IG: Penelope, the book’s narrator, does hold things together, doesn’t she? Which raises another question: Is it difficult writing from a woman’s point of view?
Ron It’s challenging but not especially difficult.
IG: Challenging in what way?
Ron Challenging in the same way it’s challenging to write about anybody you are not, whether you are trying to imagine what it is to be a person of color or not a person of color, a minority or a majority, a wealthy person or a poor person. Some things you cannot presume to know. Some things you just have to guess at. The main thing is to feel for the most humane stuff. As Penelope, I am concerned about my kids and my husband but also about my deferred or dashed dreams.
IG: Some of these stories appeared in your collection, A Bed of Nails. Why didn’t you jut make Kiss Me, Stranger a collection of stories?
Ron Those stories were well received, but I really wanted a firmer center of gravity for the narrative, so I gave the whole thing to Penelope, the abandoned mother of fourteen children.
IG: What are you working on now?
Ron A comic novel called “My Mutant Son,” about fatherhood and life in America.
IG: Any more illustrated books in your future?
Ron Actually I’ve illustrated a memoir about how my girl friend and I bought a wrecked frat house in Baltimore and restored it to its original 1897 grandeur -- when we knew nothing about repairing houses. It’s called From Animal House to Our House: A Love Story. We nearly went bankrupt, nearly broke up, nearly died, etcetera but succeeded finally, then we got married in the house.
IG: Is that coming out soon?
Ron I’m shopping it around. Light a candle.
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