Paolo Iacovelli: On Channeling an American Video-Gambling Monster, the Importance of Controversy in Art, and His Debut Novel, “The King of Video Poker”
Remember the shooting at the Las Vegas country music festival? I first heard about it in the courtyard of Sisyphos in Berlin. I couldn’t understand it then. Not that I do now either. But Paolo Iacovelli’s debut novel The King of Video Poker, through its pre-construction of this American tragedy, works to clarify the perverse motivations at play.
In the book, Iacovelli tests the fragility of a stable-presenting father and husband dissatisfied with the quagmire of his upper-middle-class day-to-day. The resulting illustration of a man wobbling from his precariously balanced life as a professional gambler is as unsettling as it is addicting.
It’s a Vegas novel where the requisite siren call girl, promiscuous maitre’d, disconnected son, and naive wife blur to force the narrator’s rationalization of his disturbing leap from nobody to lone gunman. We talked about it.
Al Jacobs: Where were you when you first heard about the shooting at the country music festival in Las Vegas [that inspired your novel]?
Paolo Iacovelli: I was at my friend’s place and the news was on in the background, but he had this really big TV—the combination of how big the TV was with how the media was sensationalizing the event, I couldn’t look away. I was thinking, “This isn’t real. There’s no way this just happened.” At some point they mentioned him being a video poker player and that detail stuck with me. I was reading Crime and Punishment at the time and I started seeing him as this modern day Raskolnikov, and my mind started to wander and conjure up what his life was like, and it became an immediate obsession.
ALJ: The King of Video Poker seems to be primarily about the cracking of a man before he commits a particularly heinous mass murder. It seems like these types of deranged events happen all the time in America. What specifically drew you to this one, to this character?
PI: This one seemed different. The crime didn’t share the commonalities that the majority of mass shootings tend to share. This guy didn’t fit the bill. He wasn’t a teen, navigating all of the mental and social vulnerabilities of that phase. He didn’t have any social media with unsettling posts. He didn’t leave behind a manifesto. There were no obvious signs. It truly felt like there was no motive, that it was the most random act of violence. But then they found his hard drive revealing all the research that went into it. And there was a horror inherent in how meticulously planned it was, which seemed to go against it being a random act of violence. Because how could it be random and still be planned to that degree? It was greatly premeditated. I kept asking myself, why on earth did he do it? What was the motive? What drives a man to commit such a horrible act of pure evil? I started asking myself all these questions, and the need to understand what I simply couldn’t understand drew me in to further explore this character.
ALJ: In exploring this particular character, what parts of yourself, your writing, did you access that felt new?
PI: That’s a good question, but I don’t know if I have a good answer. I accessed a journalistic level of research and that felt new, since at the time I would have put money on my first novel being a roman-à-clef. I tried to do all the research humanly possible. I read the FBI’s 300-page report. I read everything about him that was out there, but there wasn’t much since he was a recluse and led such a private life. I went out to Vegas and drove up to his house in Mesquite to get a sense of where he lived and what his life was like. I visited a diner and some other regular areas in Vegas. I saw the spot where it happened. At some point I was walking down Fremont Street in downtown Vegas, crowded with street performers and tourists, and with all the research I was doing and with how fully immersed I was in trying to inhabit his mind, it all culminated. I kept looking up, thinking if there ever were a perfect place to do a shooting, this was it. I ended up having a panic attack. That’s when I knew the darkness of all the research was really getting to me. It was kind of scary.
ALJ: And that was just in the research phase of writing it. What about when you were trying to sell it? I know you encountered resistance to the concept of this novel when you were querying it.
PI: Agents and publishers said it was too controversial. Nobody wanted to touch it because of the subject matter. It wasn’t sexy.
ALJ: Even though the issue it’s addressing is and has been relevant for a while?
PI: I didn’t think publishers would be so afraid of the subject matter precisely because of how timely it is. But they were, and it was tough—it was rejection after rejection after rejection. And the thing is, you start to doubt yourself, you start to think, “Maybe they’re right, maybe this is a terrible idea and I shouldn’t be trying to publish this thing.” You start to wonder if you should compromise and give in to what they’re asking for and not see your vision through.
ALJ: That’s frustrating—what changes did they suggest to make it more appealing to publish
PI: The most absurd was when one person, to paraphrase, said something along the lines of: “I would love to publish it, but cut everything about the shooter. I’m into the Tony Soprano in Vegas vibe. I’m into the critique of capitalism. Just cut the mass shooter shit.” I was like, “So you want a different book?” They were asking for something else. I’m immensely grateful to CLASH for not being scared of the subject matter and their willingness to take a chance on it.
ALJ: In your mind, what makes your book controversial?
PI: The funny thing is that, to me, it doesn’t feel that controversial. But I guess the idea of a mass shooter seems controversial because people don’t want to confront and face that in this country. I can think of a million books that are far more controversial than mine. I don’t think there’s anything controversial about it until the end, when you realize you’re getting a character study of this mass shooter.
ALJ: What’s the most controversial book you can think of?
PI: The 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade. It’s a French book. He wrote it in prison in 1785, but it wasn’t actually published until 1904. It was banned, then published again in 1960. It’s about these rich libertine dudes in France who are staying at this castle and they have a group of teenagers as servants, and they’re just having massive orgies and making them do the sickest, most twisted things. It’s got the most depraved, debaucherous sex scenes I’ve ever come across and it’s just one after another. American Psycho looks like a children’s book in comparison. It’s like Clockwork Orange on steroids. People have come out and said it should never have been published, and other people have come out and said it’s a literary masterpiece. I remember reading it in high school and thinking, “This is fucking insane.” If you’re going to check it out, make sure to have a bucket ready.
ALJ: That sounds like a wild one. Maybe the wildest. How do you think the de Sade novel compares to The King of Video Poker?
PI: Not in the slightest. I grew up falling in love with transgressive fiction, and all the authors I gravitated toward were transgressive. Burroughs, Hubert Selby Jr., Chuck Palahniuk, Hunter S. Thompson, Bret Easton Ellis…. all the usual suspects. I don’t think The King of Video Poker is nearly as controversial. When I first wrote the book I had a gut reaction to have scenes that were shocking, and then I realized that I was just trying to go for shock value, but they didn’t work in my book. The authors I looked up to had good reasons for including shocking scenes. I definitely tried to write scenes à la America Psycho, but during the process I took them out because they didn’t really do anything for the plot or the characters or the ideas I was trying to satirize. But it’s tough, it’s a tough line to walk, to know when to write something that’s understated and have it be “off-screen.”
ALJ: When you were writing it, did you picture it as a movie? On- or off-screen approaches to ideas and characters?
PI: Yeah, I was definitely thinking about what it would look like on screen. I tend to think in images first so I would see scenes in my head. In terms of doing things off-screen, I’ve had the experience of sometimes reading a scene, even in novels by Bret Easton Ellis, who’s my literary hero, and I’d ask myself, “Did we need this?” But I think that was the moment where I had to go, okay I’m my own writer, I’m not BEE, and I’m going to do some of those things off-screen.
ALJ: Were there scenes you initially wrote that you took out?
PI: I wrote a couple of scenes that would be considered quite controversial but I ended up self-censoring and took them out. One example that comes to mind: they found kiddie porn on the Vegas shooters’ hard-drive so I initially wrote a scene where he’s watching kiddie porn. At some point during the rewriting/editing process I realized I could convey that in a more subtle way. Like, if you put a middle-aged man in a room alone with a little girl he doesn’t know, that’s creepy in and of itself. The point comes across. You don’t need to show it. So I did exactly that, and I added the detail that he’s brushing her hair, which is pretty unsettling in my opinion.
I also initially wrote a sex scene with Sophia—the escort he’s seeing—where he acts out a rape fantasy. I think the way somebody has sex can be quite revealing of who they are, of who they want to be, of what they’re suppressing, of all sorts of things. But I took that out. I wanted to subvert the expectations people may have for someone like him. That was important for me, because as much of a monster as he is, and he is unarguably, at the end of the day he is still a human being comprised of nuances. And I wanted to show the humanity within the monster.
ALJ: It’s a fine line between editing and self-censorship.
PI: I think it’s an important part of the process. On some level, it helped me develop a deeper study of this character, but cutting some of those details made it more palatable. Imagine a book about the worst mass shooter the US has ever seen with graphic scenes of rape fantasies and pages and pages of kiddie porn. Yeah, I wouldn’t want to read that book either. The subject matter of tackling a mass shooter is already controversial enough.
ALJ: What do you think about controversy just for the sake of being controversial?
PI: It’s tricky, because who’s to say, really. I think it’s important for a writer to push themselves, and I can see how in trying to do so you can find yourself writing a controversial scene that doesn’t need to be there because it’s a good writing exercise—they’re challenging to write and sometimes you get gold by pushing the scene further and further. But you have to know when to go back and cut it after the fact. Controversy for the sheer fact of being controversial can cheapen the art. Although that being said, I think controversial work, if it’s not merely for shock value but has purpose and intent, can be some of the most important art there is.
ALJ: Talk more about why controversial work is so important. The difference between tackling subjects and characters just because they’re controversial, and saying something that’s controversial for a reason.
PI: If people don’t want you to say something, or talk about something, and they’re trying to shut you up, that can be a reason to say it even louder. I’m not saying my book is the book that’s going to solve the issue of gun violence in the U.S, but I think it’s important not to be afraid to talk about it. We’re banning books but anyone can walk into Walmart and casually buy a gun.
ALJ: My read is that the book doesn’t take a moral stance regarding gun control. But that list of weapons, the length and specificity of the main character’s arsenal, does imply an element of absurdity. Where do you see the book’s moral lessons, if any?
PI: There was an early version of this where it was third person, and in that version I could tell that I, the author, was looking down on the protagonist. It was obvious that I didn’t like him. I was rooting against him. It felt preachy, like it was this moralistic book, not a novel. I didn’t like it, so I made the change to first person, and dropped the moralism.
I think the book does take a moral stance on gun control but in subtle ways through the use of absurdity. The contrast of buying guns versus liquor, or claiming buying guns is comparable to buying chicken. Sophia even acts as the moral mouthpiece at times. It’s not in your face, but it’s there.
ALJ: I picked up on some of that tongue-in-cheek humor, but the novel’s not exactly a black comedy. It does seem a bit noir-coded. What elements of Vegas noir did you consciously or subconsciously put in there?
PI: I’ve always really loved noir books and movies so I tried to add elements of that. Some of what I was reading at the time inspired the noir elements. Books like Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliott Chase, Ninety-Two In The Shade by Thomas McGuane, An American Dream by Norman Mailer, Beautiful Children by Charles Bock, Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion. Some more obvious ones: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Raymond Chandler, the film Leaving Las Vegas….
ALJ: What have the reactions been so far?
PI: Some people have been binging it in a sitting or two, and others have had to take a break because it was too dark. Someone wrote in a review that it was like if the movie Joker had been written by Don DeLillo.
ALJ: I could definitely see The King of Video Poker adapted to screen, like a cerebral A24 banger-type film. What’s your big hope for the book now that it’s out in the world?
PI: Just that people read it and people talk about it. I know not everyone is going to love it, but that’s okay. At the very least, those who hate it will realize that it captures a very real, very dark side of our world.
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'Paolo Iacovelli is a French-Italian-Colombian writer born and raised in New York City. He received his MFA from Columbia’s School of the Arts. The King of Video Poker is his debut novel.
