Interview with Aaron Gwyn, author of “The Cannibal Owl”

Aaron Gwyn is the award-winning author of three previous novels, successful narrative nonfiction, and has published a story collection. He is also an associate professor of English and very widely read on Substack on the topic of Cormac McCarthy. His newest novel is The Cannibal Owl, published by Belle Point Press in 2025. (Link here) We caught up on Zoom to chat about his new book, American literature, Cormac McCarthy, the future of the humanities, and much more.

So I've got a pretty wide range of questions, but the first few, obviously, are about your new book. Your book, Cannibal Owl, has a provocative title. How do you explain what it's about to people? Because I'm sure some people think, is it about a cannibal owl?

It is about a cannibal owl. I explain that it is a fictionalized, rendition of the life of a real guy, Levi English, who lived in 1820s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, Texas, was taken there as a child and ran away, when he was very young, and lived with the Comanche for some time. Which he did. And the novel mainly concentrates on Levi's time with the Comanche.

What would you say is the big difference between that story, both, I guess, in your telling of it and in reading it, versus, like, captivity stories? Because there are a lot of captivity stories with Native Americans. Do they read kind of the same, or do they feel totally different to you?

This feels different. Because… well, for a number of reasons. One of them is what we know about the Comanche, particularly the Comanche before they were driven into the reservation at Fort Sill, was that Comanche was more of a tribal affiliation as opposed to being, an ethnic affiliation. And so many of the people who were Comanche were people who'd been taken in raids, they were Mexican, they were Spanish, they were, Anglo-Texan, and so sometimes those people would be brought into the tribe. And depending on that person, depending on the relationships, that person would become a full member. Cynthia Parker was taken by the Comanche in, I believe 1840s Texas, and she became the mother of the most celebrated Comanche chief, Quanah Parker. So with Levi's story, he runs into a band of Comanche, as he has run away, and is not a tribe member, nor is he their captive, and so he occupies a kind of middle ground in the way I think about it.

What are you hoping readers will get from this book? What do you want them to walk away with?

 I want the book to turn them inside out. That's what I think any great work of fiction does. It should turn you inside out. So I'm not concerned that there is some historical, political, social, ideological nugget that they take away from it. But hopefully, hopefully, if I've done my job properly, they will be moved by it in various ways. Maybe there are moments where they'll be moved to laugh, and there are moments that are tragic, and there are moments where the reader really has to make up her mind, how she's going to interpret a particular passage. But mostly, I want them to be, caught up in the story of this boy inhabiting a completely different world than the one he was initially born into.

And was there something in particular that made you want to write this book right now? Was it something you were just working on for a while, or was there a sense of this book for this moment?

 The book grew out of my previous novel, All God's Children, which is about slavery and, colonial, Republican, and federal Texas. And so it centers on an enslaved woman who is an escapee, and is good at it, and keeps getting caught, and, eventually, she winds up in Texas. And in writing that story I was pursuing various narratives of people that surround her. One of those is a man named Robert Lemons, which was her son. Another is a story of a man named Duncan Lammons, who was a friend, to Robert. And then there's a story of Levi English I came across, and he appears as a character in All God's Children. Initially, he was an enormous part of it. I think he's on two or three pages now. But I realized in the stuff, the material that I completely excise from All God's Children, that there might be a standalone story about Levi English. And so I decided to go back to the material after All God's Children had been published and done what it was gonna do and look at it with a really cold eye, and see if I thought there was something there. And the material still felt like it had some energy to me. Immediately.

My first kind of speed bump with the whole thing is that I realized that the material was not in and of itself a novel. And the story I wanted to tell wasn't novel length, it wasn't a 200-page or 300-page story, and it wasn't a short story. It wasn't something that was going to be able to be published in a literary magazine because of the length, and so it falls into this usually sort of unpublishable genre, the novella. But when I approached Cassie Dodd at Belle Point about it, she was really enthusiastic, and wanted to put it out as its own standalone book, and has really been a great editor. The book has gotten far more attention than I thought I would get, and it has outsold my other books that were published, by Big Five publishers. So, I think the indie press is a real viable--what would you call it, interface?—right now.

Yeah, people are interested in smaller presses and smaller periodicals and all of that.

 Yeah, I don't want to talk too much about the business, because, you know, who cares, and no one cares, but, you know… My other books have gotten advances that were certainly sizable for me. In order to get royalties, those books have to earn out, they have to earn back, you know, the cost of production plus the advance, right? And The Cannibal Owl has sold to the extent that I'm actually seeing money on the back end, which I certainly never expected, and that's not to… I'm not, you know, boasting or bragging, I hope it doesn't come off like that… I'm wanting to encourage people. If you think you have a story of whatever genre and whatever length that might not catch the eye of an editor at, HarperCollins or Penguin Random House, you know, both great publishers, there are other venues that might be more willing to take the risk, and probably won't offer as much upfront in terms of an advance, but your book can still get a lot of attention. And you can be rewarded in various ways, and one of those is financial, which is important to any writer to be able to pay the bills, but, there are other things. So anyway, I would encourage people out there who are writers and might listen to this to, you know, think about that for a particular project.

So The Cannibal Owl, it's in the category of historical fiction. What does setting something in the past do for a story? I know in this case, it's inspired by a true story, but also just the past as a setting in general.

 Well, okay, so I think any historical novel, published in contemporary America, published right now, is both about whatever historical period the novel is set in and it's about the present moment. Just by virtue of the way fiction works. So it's commenting both on, in this case, the 1820s and 30s in Texas and it's commenting on America in the 21st century. I wouldn't say that there are intentional corollaries between characters and plot movements in the novel and that you could find a representation of them in our current landscape, but I think there are periodic obsessions, themes, in American life, and you can see those refracted through this prism, hopefully, through this prism of the 1820s and 1830s. One of those lenses is race, which continues to be a topic that haunts us, visits us, perplexes us, potentially can reward us, when we open our hearts in the right way, when we're open to people that might not be like us, and we see a common humanity. So, I think maybe there's not commentary, but we can see similar things playing out in the 1830s than as we see playing out yesterday afternoon, potentially.

Alright, so a little bit different. I follow you on Twitter, and in my mind, you're kind of the Cormac McCarthy guy. I was wondering if you could say something about that. How did you get interested in him, and what was it about his work that has kept your attention?

 So, I was in my master's program at OSU, I think I was finishing my thesis and getting ready to go into my doctoral program, at University of Denver. It was, like, 1998, and All the Pretty Horses came out in ‘92, and there were people around me who'd read it and talked about it and loved it. A good friend of mine who was a professor back at ECU, Mark Walling, he was like, “man, this guy's really special, this is a really special book.” But I didn't really… I was reading other stuff, I was reading Joyce and Faulkner and other things that I was obsessed with. And then, in the fall of ‘98, while I was writing my thesis, just for fun, I read All the Pretty Horses, and I'm ashamed to say that I just thought it was okay. I didn't fall in love with it. But a creative writing professor I had at OU, and then I would follow to University of Denver, Brian Evanson, was always talking about Blood Meridian, and he was like, “you gotta read this book. It's completely different from All the Pretty Horses. I have never seen someone do with language what McCarthy does in Blood Meridian.” So in ’99 I read it. At first, I was… I don't want to say I was put off by the violence, but there was so much of it and so little else that, for a while, I felt kind of like the book was grinding me up. And so I kind of pieced away at it over the summer, and then maybe late in the summer, I kind of hit a stride with the book. And just read the last hundred or so pages kind of breathlessly, and was so knocked out by the end of the book. And in particular, the last 50 pages, which, I won't spoil anything, but if you've read that, for a particular kind of apocalyptic experience…

And as soon as I finished that book, I started it all over, right? I started it again, and fell in love with Blood Meridian, and then began to go back to McCarthy's earlier novels. Child of God, and Outer Dark, and Suttree. It wasn't until I finished grad school, it was 2005 that I just kind of ran out of McCarthy to read. And I read The Crossing. And I loved the first section of that, which is about a young man and a wolf that he traps and then tries to save. I read Cities of the Plain. And then I thought, you know what? I'll give All the Pretty Horses another try. When I re-read it, I couldn't believe that I had been so wrong about the book. I couldn't believe that it hadn't spoken to me. And I saw what I'd seen in McCarthy's other books, his immense skill. And I also saw how different it is in terms of its warmth and the human connections. And it's got a very credible, very genuine love story, that's handled brilliantly, I thought. And it's sort of a standout. Now, that, around that time, I got an advanced copy of No Country for Old Men before it came out and wrote a review of that and was really enamored with what McCarthy's doing there, and feel like he found another register to perform in. You know, you have the neo-biblical thing he's doing in Blood Meridian, you have this lyrical but more accessible thing he's doing in the Border trilogy, and then No Country for All Men is just a very stripped-down, frictionless prose that often has a subtle lyricism to it. And it's quite beautiful, but it's just so precise.

And studying McCarthy and teaching McCarthy, I've seen students respond to his work in a way that I haven't seen them respond to the work of anyone else I teach. And part of that, I'm sure, has to do with the fact that I'm passionate about the material. I think McCarthy's one of the writers I read, Faulkner being another, Flannery O'Connor being another, that showed me that it was okay to write about rural people. I'm from rural Oklahoma, grew up on a cattle ranch there. And McCarthy, Faulkner, and O'Connor showed me that it was not only acceptable, but that you could find Shakespearean tragedy and comedy and everything else in rural people and because of the way I grew up and because of the way I was educated, I always felt so behind the 8-ball in terms of my reading. At some point, I just assumed that, well, in order for literature to be literary, it has to be about metropolitan people, it has to be about people in cities, it has to be about… Even though I had no experience of any of that. But it was when that I began to write about my own rural experience that the fiction I was writing began to work. And the stuff I had written before that, hadn't. So my own connection with place, I became confident about that because of what I saw McCarthy, Faulkner, and O'Connor doing.

You said your students react more to it. That kind of leads to my next question. To the extent that literature is “popular,” it just seems like McCarthy is considered so cool by so many people. And I just don't see thoughtful undergraduate men carrying Salinger around, whereas maybe at some point they did. But you can find these undergrads reading Blood Meridian. And it's not always the easiest to read, just the intensity of it, but then also the language is very archaic, but they love it. What do you think accounts for this appeal? Why is McCarthy kind of having a moment?

I feel like I have particular insight into this, because I started teaching the book when I was a graduate student who was also teaching at the university. I was teaching Intro to Literature classes and everything. And I saw how students reacted to the book in 2001, and how many were put off by it and kind of never got on board. Though there would always be, there always has been an initial reluctance by students. They're like, “what am I getting into? This is brutal.” This one young woman said, one of the first times I taught the book, she's like, “oh yeah, I get this book. It's like, there's some people over there, let's kill them.” And I think that was generally their response. That would change when the Judge re-enters the book around page 75 or so, because he's this extraordinary villain and has all these properties that we associate with the great villains of literature, like Iago, Milton’s Satan, Ahab, Hannibal Lecter--these outsized, charismatic, philosophical villains, that are always ahead of the, I won't say hero, but the protagonist, at least.

When I started teaching around 2004, 2005, there was a real reluctance. But then several things happened. Blood Meridian has been so influential, not just on other books and other novels, but on media generally. And a great many films owe their worldview and their technique to what McCarthy is doing in Blood Meridian. And a great many video games owe their entire narrative approach and stylistic presentation to Blood Meridian. I'm thinking particularly of the Red Dead Redemption games. So the students I've had over the past 10 years have responded to Blood Meridian right away. And responded in a really intense way, because of the media they've been raised on, particularly video games. You see the thumbprint of Blood Meridian in HBO's Deadwood, for certain. You see the thumbprint of Blood Meridian in various anime series, movies, etc. And I think they've been affected by Blood Meridian before they pick up a copy of Blood Meridian. So the culture has already taught them how to read this book. And they walk into it with this weird preparation that they didn't have in 2001, 2005. It's interesting. I really believe that.

Tied to your teaching then, you know, kind of everywhere, the humanities, we're not doing great. We're on the decline… literature's on the decline… Do you have a pitch? Do you have an elevator pitch for the humanities or for literature? Or do you decline to pitch? What are your thoughts?

I don't know if I have a pitch, but I would say this: The people who care about literature, and whether those people are writers, or readers, or teachers, or scholars, whatever it happens to be… If we want this wonderful thing to continue, we are going to have to replicate the experience of what we had, most of us, in college. We're going have to replicate that outside of the university. Maybe the university will recover, maybe the humanities will recover, I don't want to be a doomer about all this. You can never tell what's going to happen. But I think there are ways to replicate parts of the experience. It's never going to be what it was when you and I, for the first time, were sitting in a classroom, and we read Hamlet, or The Handmaid's Tale, or whatever it was that really grabbed us. And we had a really charismatic professor who opened our eyes and we fell in love. That's how, that's what it was for me, I fell in love. With literature. I think we're going have to do that with what you're doing right now. With a podcast, in blogs, and forums, and social media, and YouTube, and Substack, I think we're going to have to build it. And I believe now that it can be--I know it can be done. I'll say that.

I've been a professor at UNCC for 22 years now. And I've gone through phases of, like, “oh my gosh, this enterprise is doomed” and being just really glum about it. But when I started my Substack, the interest and the number of eyes it got, and the way those essays about, Blood Meridian and Cormac McCarthy were shared... I was like, “oh!” Tons and tons of people still love literature, still love books, still love language. There's actually no dearth of that. Whatever it is, in whatever way the humanities has chosen to present that over the past few decades, it hasn't been effective. And it certainly hasn't been as effective as we wanted to be, or we wouldn't be in the position we're in. We're caught, if you're in the academy, you're caught in the squeeze which started,

to my thinking and my experience, during the 2008 financial crisis. That's when I began to see a bleed of financial resources, a bleed of students in terms of people couldn't afford to go to college. And the second big moment was during COVID, when a lot of us were conducting classes remotely, and students, you can say they were right or they were wrong, you can argue the merits, but there were a lot of students who were just like, oh, I'm not going pay for college over Zoom. For whatever reason, right? They just didn't feel like the juice was worth a squeeze. And so I saw another, falloff, just in terms of enrollment, in terms of engagement. So, we're squeezed by that. We're squeezed by the government's vision of what the humanities are or should be. And the government being federal, and the government being state, depending on what state you're in. I mean, there's a squeeze that way, and we all know what it is. We all know what's going on. And there's a squeeze from--the students aren't causing this, I don't want to suggest that--but they have been introduced and trained on technology, like AI, like ChatGPT, and are conversant with it. I'm almost 53, turn 53 this month, you know, I grew up mostly without the internet, until I was in my mid-20s. But they've inculcated all these technologies, and as far as I can tell, I think that presents a real challenge. And I don't know anyone who makes things or teaches things about, art and artifice, who isn't panicked about what AI is going to do. Like, everyone I know, from comedians to novelists to poets to screenwriters and filmmakers and musicians--this is a huge topic among musicians. They're all quite panicked about what this will do.

I can't, of course, predict what's going to happen, I never have been able to, but I can remember a moment… it's not quite analogous, but it just reminds me of it, when iTunes first came out in the early 2000s, and MP3s and MP3 players. And the kids were listening to music that way. I was like, oh, it's fine, you know, it's just another version of the CD, or another version of the record, or 8-track. It's just this other thing. And it's a gadget and they'll either get tired of it, or they'll use that and they'll use CDs. Because what I argued is, people are too addicted and in love with the physical object. You know, they want to have the album and the vinyl. They want to have the liner notes and the artwork. They want to have the CD. And I thought, they'll never let go of it. And boy, was I wrong. Right? And the digital completely took over. Completely took over. YouTube Music and Spotify and iMusic and all that stuff, right?

So, I think that those of us who think AI will never be able to write a great novel--which is something I believe, because it isn't human--I don't think we're quite prepared. Not for what AI will be able to accomplish, but for how young people will adopt whatever AI creates.

Back to literature more strictly, if you're doing a canon of 20th century American literature, who’s in? Who are some of the books or authors that are must-read? 20th Century American.

American? Well, there’s the usual suspects. There's T.S. Eliot, who converts to being a Brit, but he's a St. Louis boy. T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Hilda Doolittle… Novelists, in the same era, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald… I'm going to leave all kinds of people out, people are going to be yelling at me and I understand. And the, Flannery O'Connor, John Hawkes, Carson McCullers, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, Don DeLillo, Cheever, John Updike. I'm kind of going through the years as I make my way.

And then from our own century, the closer we get, it's harder to think about. What's going stand the test of the time. I think Philipp Meyer’s The Son is certainly one of those books. Jonathan Franzen, I think, is going be someone people return to. And people love to hate on Franzen, but he's one of the few novelists America has who are still alive, that just regular people who might read one or two novels a year, when a new Jonathan Franzen book comes out, they will go and put their lives on hold. And, I mean, we can envy that. I'm envious of someone with that kind of genius. But it's a real thing about Franzen, and he has it in spades. I think David Foster Wallace, you know, people still love him. I'm a fan of Wallace because of his creative nonfiction. I think he was a singular genius at that. But people love Infinite Jest, I think that's a book that's going to be important and hang around. It's also published in the 1990s. The only book other than Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, the only book that I would say with any kind of certainty that will definitely hang around is Philipp Meyer’s The Son. I'm sure there are others that will, I just don't have the certainty to kind of name them. I would also say Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, which is extraordinary. So, so far in our century, Colson Whitehead's the Underground Railroad, Philipp Meyer’s The Son, Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke.

Okay, one last question that's completely different. I'm in a book group that's reading Joy in the Morning by P.G. Wodehouse. It's one of those Jeeves books, and one of the book club members keeps waiting for it to get dark. She's waiting for the edgy part that's coming, and I'm, like, it's not really coming, you know? It’s just going to stay light. So, my question is, light comic novels—it seems like we don’t have as many of them as we did at some point. I guess I'm thinking about something like Auntie Mame, that whole 20th century light comic novel. What do they do for readers and why aren't we seeing a lot of them now?

I don't know. I would not read them. If someone said, “this book's really funny,” I'd be like, “I don't want to read that.” Paul Beatty's The Sellout? It's not light, but it is comic. That's one that people point to. I really love Richard Russo's The Risk Pool. Those are comic novels, and I mean comedy in the Shakespearean sense, of taking a character from a low station to a higher station.

I don't know exactly the answer to your question. But I think it has something to do with the fact that people of every political faction, people from all demographics, across the country, rural, urban, whatever, no one thinks things are getting better. Everyone thinks they're getting worse. Everyone is prepared for calamity. And have been for years and years and years. We all--all the people I know--I don't know any Americans who are hopeful about the future, or who have been for the past several decades. Since 9-11, I feel like everyone is bracing for impact. I don't know that that breeds comedy, necessarily. I see more interest in apocalypse, which is more comforting than comedy, because it's over. Apocalypse is very comforting for people. As a genre, that's why it's so appealing, because, well, there's nothing worse that can happen, this is the worst.

Oh, actually, I guess I do have one more question, then, I think tied into the apocalypse. Everything has been zombies lately. I feel like if we go back 100 or 200 years before that, vampires were the hot thing for a long time, right? The big fear was vampires who were more suave and sophisticated and cosmopolitan. They trick you and they're always well-dressed. You never see a shabbily dressed vampire. And now the fear is zombies, and zombies are just mindless, decomposing drones. That's their whole vibe. Why is that the fear now, versus vampires, or something else?

 I relate it to whoever American troops are fighting. I mean, obviously, Bram Stoker was Irish, but vampires became a real phenomenon when we were in World War I, right? And the enemy was cast as being vampiric. Werewolves became a phenomenon in the 1930s and 1940s, and there was an association of the werewolf with the Germans. And there are a lot of German folk tales about werewolves. The Nazis played on that. They had an Operation Werewolf and all this kind of stuff. And then that shifts in Vietnam, the GIs thought of the Viet Cong as ghosts, right? So, they're all these kind of ghost stories. And then, in the Global War on Terror, our troops, especially in Afghanistan, are fighting, you know, guys who, a lot of whom, use morphine. And they are you know, jacked up, and you know, we shoot them and they fall down and get back up. That's an actual experience a lot of our troops have reported. The metaphor of the zombie sort of begins to spring to mind and then it becomes more than a metaphor. I know troops who carried machetes. I mean, guys who were carrying 50 to 90 pounds every day if they were out on patrol and having to actually patrol beside an armored vehicle… they would carry machetes, because they believed that was the only way to kill the zombies. Even though zombies don't exist. And they would have patches on their uniforms that would say, “official zombie hunter,” right? So the figure of the zombie became so outsized that it became a kind of truth. I think that the zombie isn't going to be here forever. I think we're leaving the zombies behind. I think there's going to be something else. I don't know what that is, but I think another monster is going to take its place.

It's someone else's turn.

 There's always another monster.

This interview was conducted in August 2025 by Elizabeth Stice.