Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal, who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm pleased to have as my guest, Mark Z. Danilevsky.

He's been on the show before for his novel House of Leaves.

A new novel Only Revolutions has been published by

Pantheon. Now, bit by bit, I suppose as we go along, the enormous peculiarity of this volume

and its physical nature will reveal itself.

But I thought, because that is the thing that you'll see in the book as soon as you pick it up,

I thought we'd begin with the less immediate thing, its actual story.

It's a kind of, well, the book flaps say Romeo and Juliet and Tristan and Isolda, but it's a road romance.

And it reminded me of things like Bonnie and Clyde, or more specifically of Badlands.

Natural-born killers. Natural-born killers, right.

Although the violence is mostly kept off-road.

You know, if they are destructive, this couple, they don't register the nature of their destruction, except perhaps

in a running list of catastrophes that accompanies their exploits. Now, tell me what the inception was.

Oh, the inception. My God. I was just hearing you say, sum it up in that way. I just thought it

it's probably the darkest book I ever could have written in a way. I hope I don't write a book

as dark as that one. Because, I mean, you written in a way. I hope I don't write a book as dark as that one.

Because, I mean, you're such an acute reader to pick up the extremities of violence there and how it's enacted in a way that exceeds how we typically view a certain encounter, how it's played out in a certain Italian operatic moment, spouts of blood.

...