Taking a Hammer to Las Vegas
An Interview with Jarret Keene
Jarret Keene’s fevered imagination, as well as his dedication to writing and to those who write, has taken his career in several noteworthy directions. He has published two collections of poetry (Monster Fashion – Manic D Press; A Boy’s Guide to Arson – Zeitgeist Press), The Underground Guide to Las Vegas, and a book about the band The Killers (both with Manic D Press). Keene has also edited thirteen volumes of the Las Vegas Writes anthology – the latest volume is Neon Riffs and Lounge Acts: Las Vegas Writers on Music (Huntington Press). He has also taught literature and creative writing at the College of Southern Nevada and the University of Nevada Las Vegas. Keene frequently teaches about comics and is currently at work on a book about legendary comics artist Jack Kirby.
Jarret and I were fast friends when we both attended the same middle school in Tampa, Florida in the mid-1980s. At the time, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were still just characters in a comic book, Frank Miller gave us our first thoughts about growing old with The Dark Knight Returns, and Alan Moore challenged our understanding of what it means to be human with The Saga of the Swamp Thing. In those days, UK metal bands Iron Maiden and Judas Priest furnished the ideal soundtrack for every occasion (or so we thought).
I reconnected with Jarret when I took a job at UNLV in 2015. I was delighted to learn that – despite the purportedly civilizing influences of career, marriage, and kids – for both of us, our middle school tastes and experiences still figure prominently in how we see the world.
I caught up with Jarret to talk with him about his recently published novel, Hammer of the Dogs (University of Nevada Press). Keene’s hero, Lash, has cynicism beaten into her by the horrific events of her teen years: the utter collapse of social order in Las Vegas, the loss of her family in the mayhem that followed, and physical injuries that impact her judgment, her memory, and even her ability to sleep. The resulting cynicism is both a strength and a distraction as she finds herself in the midst of a power struggle between rival warlords – both need Lash’s unmatched prowess in combat in order to gain the upper hand.
Mark Lenker: My favorite part of Hammer is the way that you transformed glitzy, luxurious Las Vegas into a deadly hellscape. The most chilling part is that it feels like near-future Las Vegas – recent visitors and locals will recognize the landmarks and major buildings in the story. And your shattered Vegas is built on themes we see in the news today. If you take our current obsession with STEM education, our fascination with drones, our fraught geopolitical circumstances, and our delicate ecological situation, and give them all just a little twist in an unfortunate direction, we find ourselves in a Las Vegas much like the one depicted in Hammer. How did you pull that off?
Jarret Keene: Every glamorous tourist spot has a dark side, a seedy underbelly, from Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida to Aspen, Colorado, to Napa Valley in California. Las Vegas is different because we offer technological beauty in what is otherwise a vast desert, a location that many view as a boring sandpit scarred by suburban sprawl. How can you look at something like the Sphere, a giant LED orb pulsating on the Strip, and NOT think that such a futuristic structure would look amazing in a post-apocalyptic setting? Anyhow, there is a flawed assumption, not just in Las Vegas but everywhere it seems, that a STEM approach can solve all our problems, which is why we’re tearing up the desert ecosystem with mining, and installing solar-panel and windmill farms. The Las Vegas Valley is in the throes of ecological catastrophe – the water is running out, Elon Musk’s Boring Company is running roughshod over the Strip, and we think that teaching young people to code is going to save us? STEM is the last thing young people need, which is what I try to extrapolate in Hammer of the Dogs. Science doesn’t provide the real solution to our problems, which are existential and spiritual. The military-industrial complex is the science that’s being implemented in Las Vegas and around the country. Drones are at the vanguard of technological advancements, and young people must pick them up and learn how to hack and operate them. This is what Lash does, how she survives. Otherwise, drones will leash the young and make them submit to tyranny. Look at how kids today are immediately paired with tablets, smartphones, and “educational” software. Lash isn’t having it. She prefers to do push-ups, read the Iliad, pray to a forgotten God, and build lethal robots to keep predators at bay.
M.L.: It struck me that both warlords in your story see educating the youth as a vital strategy for achieving their ends. In some respects, the education is kind of brutal, but in other respects, it reminds me of STEM-centered, problem-based learning and sending your kids to robotics camp. What prompted you to feature this sort of education in your story?
J.K.: The warlord robot sessions in Hammer of the Dogs are a thinly veiled satire of these coding and bot-building camps you see advertised all the time and that take place on college campuses. I sent my own kids to them, and they’re ridiculous even if the instructors are well-intentioned. I imagined how kids might be trained in a dystopian environment. In Hammer of the Dogs, Lash is trained in a grim, dark, underground drone school in the basement of Luxor. Later, after getting captured by the enemy warlord, she ends up becoming a teacher in his clean, lavish, climate-controlled luxury hotel-casino. But it’s all compromised by the fact that he has to sacrifice some of his students to the gladiatorial games designed to entertain Russian tourists, death matches between kids and robots. We’re already in a cold war with robots via ChatGPT, and AI will certainly destroy jobs. It’s a small leap from our current reality to depict a scenario in which children must fight drones for the entertainment of the world’s new despoilers.
M.L.: Tell us about the choices you made with Lash. Why did you go with a female protagonist for this story?
J.K.: The best sci-fi, fantasy, and adventure protagonists in cinema are women: Ellen Ripley, Sarah Conner, Sarah Williams (Labyrinth), Ayla (The Clan of the Cave Bear), Red Sonja, Sheena, Supergirl, Billie Jean Davy (The Legend of Billie Jean). With Hammer of the Dogs, I committed to the idea of writing the ultimate ’80s movie, because ’80s movies are fun, freewheeling, full of life, and subversively spiritual. Legendary Gen-X screenwriter/director Quentin Tarantino has stated that the ’80s was a conservative time in moviemaking, but he’s wrong. The 1980s was a shining moment for rollickin’ yet thoughtful and introspective visual entertainment, an era of “bright darkness” in storytelling, and everything that came after is—for the most part—uptight, grumpy, grimey, derivative, closed-off, CGI-dependent nonsense. I want to push storytellers and readers toward the “bright darkness” that movies used to offer, especially in the ’80s with fantasy works like Blade Runner, Aliens, Ladyhawke, Enemy Mine, Red Dawn, The Last Starfighter, The Black Hole, The Black Stallion, Heavy Metal, Howard the Duck, Labyrinth, Legend, Tron, Megaforce, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. I wanted to create a character that stood with the best—a woman who is, yes, a badass but also hugely flawed and damaged almost beyond belief. Lash has to figure out how to become a leader, and to do that she must become vulnerable and disciplined. She must reject the Disney notion of “being yourself.” She is a born weapon who must learn how to love again, and then show everyone around her how to do the same. Remember Ripley’s developmental arc and Conner’s transformation? They go from being hunted to becoming hunters. They must adapt or die. What ultimately gives them the strength to fight against impossible odds? Their love for the people around them. This is the only way to write an enduring story. If you disagree, that’s fine, but I’m right. What surprised me the most in writing Lash is that I didn’t create or stage-manage her. She fashioned herself and told me what she wanted to do, and I just typed. I’m not exaggerating: Lash made me her instrument.
M.L.: The details really pop in this novel. There is more texture than one could achieve by merely reading a guide book to Las Vegas – you must have explored a lot of the particulars firsthand. What’s the most outlandish thing you had to research for this novel?
J.K.: I didn’t research the Las Vegas particulars, because I’ve lived in Las Vegas for 22 years. I worked for a long time in the basement of the Luxor, just like Lash. As a corporate communicator, I inhabited the “back of house” area of every hotel-casino on the Las Vegas Strip, from employee dining rooms to surveillance centers to the wave machine at Mandalay Bay Beach to the Luxor Sky Beam. As an entertainment journalist, I had unfettered access to the Strip and beyond, which made the setting so much fun and so easy to construct. Hammer of the Dogs, with Las Vegas as a technological playground, is grounded in reality and lived experience. The research was conducted firsthand, and I rarely had to make up anything, because Las Vegas continues to operate at the tech vanguard, which is a blessing and a curse. The most outlandish “research” aspect was having absorbed dozens of books over the years on the history of weapons testing and mining in this part of Nevada. Las Vegas specifically, and Nevada generally, exist for the pleasure of the wealthy and for government warmongers. This is rarely discussed. So Hammer of the Dogs is here to get us talking about that in between roller-coaster chapters.
M.L.: In Hammer, religion and technology are fused in unexpected ways. Where did that fusion come from?
J.K.: From observing and overhearing tech people here at tech conventions in Las Vegas discuss concepts such as the Singularity. They openly and without irony talk about the possibility that we live in an AI simulation. In other words, the tech crowd has its own religious belief in the notion of an afterlife, in the merging of human and cybernetic consciousness. And yet they look down on those who possess faith in gods, in God, outside of the machine. I wanted to zero in on that line of “science-based” thinking, and show it leading to an eerie, godless future-shock. There’s nothing more annoying, or more hideous really, than an avowed tech-atheist contemplating the idea of human consciousness being uploaded to the cloud. They’re blind to their own madness and religious fervor, which is why the antagonists in Hammer of the Dogs are so compelling. Some of what they say sounds feasible, but it’s all zealotry for religion centered on rare earth minerals and microchips. Lash says it best: Atheists have their own dogma, as absurd and brutal as any other faith.
M.L.: The gritty, scrubbly, sun-bleached desert of southern Nevada figures prominently in the story. How does ecology influence the world of Hammer?
J.K.: Ecology is in short supply in the southwest. The Nevada desert has always been a playground for military contractors and war engineers, going all the way back to the construction of Hoover Dam. With the Cold War, the U.S. government set off atomic bombs at the Nevada National Security Site, poisoning “downwinders,” or anyone caught in the radioactive fallout zones. That wasn’t enough, so they detonated nukes underground. More recently, we have Creech Air Force Base, where drone operators kill strangers overseas with the push of a button. Nevada was the first state to let Google test its self-driving cars. Las Vegas is letting Elon Musk’s Boring Company build multiple tunnels, like the Vegas Loop, under the Strip for underground Tesla vehicles to transport people from hotel-casino to hotel-casino. Energy corporations are destroying the Nevada desert right now to build solar-panel fields that will, in just a few decades, become solar dead zones. People see the desert as a sandpit, where they can do whatever they want and damn the consequences. We don’t respect the desert, and until we do there is only technological agony in store for humanity in the southwest. We must get in touch with the beauty of the Southwest before it’s too late. Otherwise, the plausibility of Hammer of the Dogs grows likelier. It will be up to young people like Lash, young people who don’t want to be leashed by the government, and who instead will serve to remind the government and its politicians that they work for us. This isn’t a libertarian argument, by the way. It’s an authentically liberal position, and soon many young people will have had enough and will fight back the way Lash does, by using their bodies and their minds as weapons against overreaching authority and out-of-control tech wizards intent on poisoning the desert and their lives. Resistance is inevitable, and it makes me happy knowing it will arrive sooner than most anticipate.
M.L.: You explore a very grim possible future in Hammer. Las Vegas has undergone a cataclysmic social collapse (one that leaves many of the iconic buildings still standing), the federal government has withdrawn, and local warlords vie for control of resources using warbots and combat drones piloted by adolescents. How much of this scenario is make-believe, and how much do you see as a legitimate possibility?
J.K.: Well, we’re nearly there. But entropy can be fun! Watching things fall apart, as we have the last few years, teaches you things and can inspire a writer enough to create something bright within the darkness. The social collapse happened during COVID-19, the destruction of the world economy, and the distraction of Trump and Biden, a fast-food-munching narcissist and a dementia-stricken warmonger. The iconic buildings remain, but beneath them, living in storm drains, are hundreds, maybe thousands, of lost souls, the forgotten, the cast-offs. Tent cities are popping up all over the nation. Crime is rampant. The federal government only cares about sending arms to Ukraine so that Raytheon can reap trillions and so that teenagers kill each other for senseless reasons no one really understands. People suffer, but corporations are thriving. Children are left alone to be raised by smartphones and violent video games. Luckily for us, Mark, you and I read enough dystopian comic books—V for Vendetta, Watchmen, American Flagg, Scout, Tank Girl—so that we were prepared for this moment. Hammer of the Dogs is a novel centered on a minimal extrapolation, in my view. Sure, it’s all make-believe, but the scenario is certainly possible given the direction this country is heading. We’ve lost our spiritual mooring and replaced God with technology, with Pandora’s box. We’ve opened a figurative portal to hell with drone technology. It’s an exciting moment to be alive, to be a writer.
M.L.: In the midst of such overwhelming social decay, do you see any reason for hope?
J.K.: If Hammer of the Dogs has a theme, it’s this: The more things grind on and “do the collapse,” the better chance there is for a healthy response, a reaction to undo the damage that has occurred. The solutions are simple, but they’re made to seem complex and pie-in-the-sky so that we despair and surrender. We must commit ourselves to the project of physical and spiritual renewal, and the best way to do that is by embracing fun again, the kind of pleasure and joy that we witnessed in ’80s pop culture—with wild music, imaginative cinema, and outlandish fiction. All of that was tainted to a degree by the bizarre politics of the era, with the Cold War and Iran-Contra and the drug explosion and the ketchup-is-a-vegetable fiasco. I see hope in my students here in Las Vegas, many of whose parents work on or near the Strip. They want to relish the basic things in life: a good job, a good family, a modest house to live in. They’re the furthest goals from the minds of voracious baby boomers or who-cares-let-it-burn Gen Xers. We can make good things happen in Las Vegas, and everywhere in this country if we refocus on what we need rather than what we want—and what we want delivered to our house in a few hours courtesy of the Internet. My students give me hope, and so Hammer of the Dogs is for them to read and use.
M.L.: Describe your ideal reader.
J.K.: A mixed-race young reader, like I was during the ’80s, who feels, at this moment, a bit overwhelmed by social media and by political insanity, who is looking for another way to live and fight. I wish I had read a novel like Hammer of the Dogs when I was a child growing up in Tampa, Florida, never quite fitting into either the Anglosphere or the ethnic enclave of Ybor City. For my whole life, I had bad information, faulty programming. I thought I had to choose between the two sides of my family. But that’s just political theater, and I’m done with that. My students, many of whom are mixed-race, have a better grasp of reality, of what’s at stake, than I did as a kid. I wrote Hammer of the Dogs for them, but also for anyone who’s disappointed in our current circumstances and who wants to enjoy a righteous, super-fun thrill ride that will make them ponder important issues even as the characters and the story take their breath away. So to be more plain, I’m writing stories for kids who remind me of who I was as a young person—someone lost, lonely, and lustful.
M.L.: What is your writing process like?
J.K.: My writing process is that I write every day. For me, writing is exercise, like hiking with my dogs in the desert. I learned to write daily from my stint as a deadline-saddled journalist and corporate writer. I don’t believe in writer’s block, and I always feel better if I’ve written a thousand words at some point in the day. My writing process for Hammer of the Dogs was slightly different in that I was motivated to a degree in challenging the current literary environment, so I engaged in “bravura” moments, striving for Homeric violence in the scenes of battle. I found myself dipping into Richard Lattimore’s translation of the Iliad in an attempt to borrow the energy of Achilles and Hector bashing each other senseless on the plains of Troy.
M.L.: What’s it like working with an academic press to publish fiction? Are there any noteworthy differences from other publishing houses?
J.K.: I had no expectation that a university press would be interested in a sci-fi novel. At the same time I’d heard that there was a new, younger, incoming acquisitions editor there who might get what I was doing. He gave my novel to two peer reviewers, and the reviews and notes were glowing. So I tucked into rewriting several chapters to address the concerns of the reviewers, which took a few months, and then it was off to production, which took about a year. I had been used to getting assignments from a commercial indie book publisher, and then turning in the project on deadline with minimal edits and minimal proofing and minimal fact-checking. So I was grateful to see serious attention paid to my novel, page by page, line by line, checking the facts, names, and details of Las Vegas hotel-casinos.
M.L.: Is there any chance that we will hear from Lash and company again in a sequel?
J.K.: I’d love for Hammer of the Dogs to sell well enough so that I can write two more novels starring Lash. At this point, she is the only reason I have for returning to the “ruined Las Vegas timeline.” I’d love to watch her take the fight to the “AI Goblin King” and eventually slay drones on Mars.
