M. Parffit and Claudius Reich outside Borderlands Books.

Claudius Reich describes himself an aging Bohemian who lives in San Francisco. Some of his stranger essays have been published in the books Lend The Eye A Terrible Aspect and Death’s Garden: Relationships with Cemeteries, as well as in five of Morbid Curiosity magazine. He has written about why we OD, hitchhiking on America’s back roads, the graveyard where he grew up, and volunteering at San Francisco’s Needle Exchange.

Claudius will read "Dragon's Teeth," from Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues, at Books Inc. on Market in San Francisco on Friday, November 6, at 7:30 p.m.

Q: What does morbid curiosity mean to you?
A: During one of my exciting periodontal adventures, the doc was supposed to simply open up my gum, plaster some magic stuff on the decayed tooth, and close 'er up again. He anesthetized, sliced, and then told me that that tooth was a goner, and what did I want to do? Did I want to see what he was talking about? He handed me the mirror, I looked at the tooth -- denuded of gum -- and thought, Cool! It goes all the way down! I was telling my sister about this, afterward, and she stopped me halfway through, putting her hands over her ears. But how could you not want to look?

Q:  How did you discover Morbid Curiosity magazine?
A:  Back when I was a frisky young thing, I ended up spending one very long evening with my roommate and a tattooed guy he knew, sitting around in his living room, taping strange music from his collection. The guy's roommates wandered in at one point and I talked with great animation at them as well. That was how I met Loren.

Q:  Did you have more than one piece in the magazine? Which was your favorite?
A:  I had pieces in all the odd-numbered issues. Unintentional, to start with -- two years seemed to be the right percolation time -- but after a while I quite liked it. My favorite is probably the bombing piece in Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues, with the drugs piece ("Why We OD") a close second.

Q:  How did the piece you have in the book come to be written?
A:  After I got home from London, I was telling Loren over dinner about being near a bomb going off while on holiday. She said, in that deceptively mild way she has, that I should write about it. I blew her off. Hey, bombs happen, right? Later, though, I found myself fretting at the memory, obsessively replaying it in my head. Getting it onto paper, I finally managed to pin down the aspects that were about the politics of it, and about my own politics and place in this world, and the very very sharp edges of By Any Means Necessary. It took writing (and rewriting, and rewriting) to nail the sense of complicity I had, of looking into a twisted mirror, which I found far more lastingly upsetting than the bomb itself.

Q:  Is there anything you’d like to add to that story now?
A:  Happily, that ghost has been quiet for a while now.

Q:  What was your favorite story in the zine, one that wasn’t your own?
A:  Lee Smith's story ("You Lock It Behind You") about visiting his mother in the mental hospital. That one haunts me. I'm still staggered that he lived through that, much less found the gallows humor in it.

Q:  Do you have a tale to tell about your involvement with the magazine or the book?
A:  The first reading, when JD was reading about helping kill his friend's lover, and tossed out that line about "What does applesauce mean in the left pocket? Euthanasia, top." There was a little ripple of nervous laughs, then people stopped themselves. He said, very cheerily, "No, no, it's funny, you're supposed to laugh." And there was this odd sense of lightness, of people realizing that they were in a group where they weren't going to be the only person who laughed at the wrong things. It was a whole roomful of us.

Q:  Have you ever been involved in one of the live events? How did that go?
A:  Every writer dreams of connecting with people, of creating something with the force of a revelation, affecting the audience in a way where the reader isn't quite the same person they were before they read the piece. It was a rare reading where I didn't get to watch that happen at least once.

Q:  Have you had another morbid experience that would make a good story?
A:  My life has been "another morbid experience." The problem is finding the narrative line...

Q:  What are you up to these days?
A:  Working for a defunct law firm, upgrading a friend's database, and plotting future prose adventures. I've given up on the Internet (my right eye? it offended me), but I seem to recall having a home page and blog at one point.