An Interview with Billy Greer

A true student of the pop culture sphere, B. D. Greer has been absorbing just about every form of media from a young age. Whether it’s legendary novels like Blood Meridian or Fight Club, Edgar Allen Poe’s oeuvre, movies, anime, folklore, or even video games, he’s not afraid to harvest and curate favored elements from the unlikeliest sources.

In fact, this varied artistic appetite has led to Greer’s personal writing philosophy: to create unapologetic genre fiction with a literary level of craft and experimental ethos. He mainly focuses on fantasy, horror, western, and crime, but his work is for anyone with an appreciation for the weirder side of life.

Greer made his official debut on Amazon with the first part of his supernatural western series 10,000 Bullets, Book 1: Riding With The Dead. He is currently working on the sequel at his home in San Antonio, Texas, where he lives with his wife, their three dogs, and two cats. In addition to writing, he also enjoys rocking out to heavy metal, collecting manga, watching weird movies, and drinking too much coffee.

Who/what made you want to write? Was there a particular person, or particular writers/works/art forms that influenced you?

My mom is the one who initially sparked my love for literature. She read a wide variety of different books to me as a child, both recreationally and for school, since I was homeschooled. From Charlotte’s Web to Johnny Tremain, these stories inspired me to try writing myself. I admired the creativity of the authors and became obsessed with how they pulled entire worlds, people, and events out of their minds. I wanted to do the same! Even before I was ten, I had started writing little stories on paper and stapling them together into book form. My methods are a little more advanced now, but that sense of fun and passion from back then remains to this day.

What inspired you to start writing this book?

Ultimately, it was two different books: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. But to back up a little, I knew for a long time that I wanted to write a Western one day. I had entered my teenage years as a budding cinephile, and some of my favorite movie-watching experiences came from John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah, and more (my dad is responsible in part for this interest).

I was absolutely enthralled by the explosive, cut-and-dry battles between good and evil upon the starkly beautiful stage of the American West. In hindsight though, I was absorbing conflict-driven storytelling, distilled to its most fundamental and engaging form. After all, what is a Western but “man vs. man” or “man vs. environment” at its most primal? That’s where my love for the genre began, and it was only solidified further after I read Blood Meridian, which both brutally subverted and artistically elevated the elements that I found so compelling.

Then, sometime later, I read American Gods and was astonished by how effortlessly Gaiman weaved the real and the fantastical together. Both parts felt equally believable. It made me rethink the more down-to-earth Western idea I had been picking away at during this time, and I asked myself a very important question: “What if I put some ghosts in it?” I think that turned out to be the right decision.

Tell us the story of your book’s title. Was it easy to find, or did it take forever?

This title didn’t come as easy as some of my other projects, but I don’t remember it taking me terribly long to find either. I believe I discovered it during the late stages of planning and outlining, when I was trying to decide on the name of the spectral outlaw gang that’s central to the story. I wanted something that paid homage to the dastardly nom-de-plumes of the era, such as The Hole-In-The-Wall Gang. When I eventually came up with The 10,000 Bullets Gang, I realized that it actually worked beautifully as a title. It felt very attention-grabbing and fit the genre while exuding a sort of schlocky, grindhouse vibe that I really liked. You could easily envision a Tarantino film with that title.

If your book had a soundtrack, what are some songs that would be on it?

Perhaps it’s somewhat incongruous, but I’ve long imagined a sort of hodgepodge of country and metal:

Johnny Cash – “When the Man Comes Around”

Conway Twitty – “Lonely Blue Boy”

Trampled By Turtles – “Feet and Bones”

The Silent Comedy – “Bartholomew”

Lamb of God – “Straight For The Sun”

All Them Witches – “When God Comes Back”

Wayfarer – “On Horseback They Carried Thunder”

Lingua Ignota – “Butcher Of The World”

Chat Pile – “Dallas Beltway” (Mainly just the opening instrumentation. I envision a non-lyrical version working well for the main band of cutthroat villains.)

Describe your dream book cover.

An image of the main character on horseback holding a gun, surrounded by floating headshots of the ghostly recruits in his posse. I believe each character is visually interesting; there’s an eternally hanging man, a mad preacher, a skeleton sharpshooter, etc., so I would want to highlight them on the cover.

What other professions have you worked in? What’s something about you that your readers wouldn’t know?

I’ve been a clerk at a consignment shop and a Hot Topic in the past, and I eventually leveraged my writing skills to work in marketing as a copywriter.

In spite of my novel’s often grim tone, I am actually quite a goofball. I draw a silly, comedic webcomic called Boring World on Instagram and film funny sketches with my brothers.

What books did you read (for research or comfort) throughout your writing process?

Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark and Donald Ray Pollock’s The Heavenly Table helped me get acquainted with the era I was writing about and its gritty, hard-scrabble nature, while B. Catling’s unique historical fantasy The Vorrh kept my imagination well-nourished. I also got into Haruki Murakami at this time, starting with A Wild Sheep Chase. I don’t know if it had a direct impact, but it was a nice “palette cleanser” of sorts between writing sessions since it was so incredibly different from what I was writing.

What is one thing you hope readers take away from reading your book? How do you envision your perfect reader?

I hope that readers are moved by 10,000 Bullet’s themes of regret, determination, and redemption and feel motivated to achieve their own goals in life.

I think my perfect reader has an open mind and isn’t afraid to explore idiosyncratic literature that exists somewhere in the margins between different genres and styles. But, most importantly, they just want to have a good time on a rootin’-tootin’, gun-slinging adventure.

Are you a writer, too? Submit your manuscript to Atmosphere Press.