Eric Schlich

Eric Schlich is the author of the story collection Quantum Convention, winner of the 2018 Katherine Anne Porter Prize and the 2020 GLCA New Writers Award.

Eli Harpo's Adventure to the Afterlife is Schlich's debut novel.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The title Eli Harpo’s Adventure to the Afterlife sets the satirical tone of the novel. It’s hyperbolic along the lines of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. And it’s of course tongue-in-cheek. The whole book is about Eli’s doubt that he went to Heaven and his rejection of the myth his father raised him to believe.

What’s in a name?

Eli is named after the Elijah of the Bible, a prophet who entered Heaven alive by fire. I chose the name Harpo because harps make me think of angels. I also like the allusion to Harpo Marx.

There’s a scene in the novel where Charlie Gideon, the televangelist who recruits the family to open a new attraction at Bible World, gifts Eli’s mom, Debbie, a Delicate Twinkling figurine of a little clown boy. Eli’s older brother Abe teases him, saying the figurine looks like Eli. Debbie says it sends the message that Gideon thinks they’re clowns and he’s just using them.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

Fairly surprised. My teen self mostly read sci-fi/fantasy. There’s a unicorn on the cover of the book, but this is not a fantasy book. Eli has sex dreams about Jesus in which they brush the mane of the unicorn he supposedly encountered in Heaven. My teen self would probably have been disappointed the unicorn isn’t real.

However, that same teenager did grapple with religion. I was confirmed in the Catholic church, but it never quite felt right. I became an atheist later in college when I started questioning everything and read a bunch of Richard Dawkins. You can definitely see that in the book.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Endings for sure. Endings are where all the meaning-making happens. How does it all turn out? How are the characters changed or not changed?

I struggled a lot with the ending of this book. I wanted to be authentic to the stories of queer people who leave religion. I wanted Eli to break away from his family and form his own chosen family with his husband, but I also wanted some kind of reconciliation with his father.

And at the same time, I don’t believe his father, Simon, a true believer, would change his mind about Heaven. So finding the right balance of bittersweetness was challenging and took multiple drafts.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I see a lot of myself in Eli. We’re both middle children, although I have two sisters instead of two brothers. We’re both introverts who shy away from too much attention. We’re both from Kentucky and attended the University of Kentucky for our undergraduate degrees.

I did try to make him different than me, though. Unlike Eli, who was homeschooled and raised in a family of evangelical Baptists, I went to public school and grew up in a family of lapsed Catholics. He struggles with weight issues I’ve never had. He’s gay and married to a man; I’m bi and married to a woman. He went into a science field (Pharmacy); I’m in the arts (writing). Some of this is superficial. His voice is my voice and I feel a strong kinship with him.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I’m a big movie and TV buff. When sending the manuscript to agents, I often pitched it as Little Miss Sunshine meets Saved!—two movies that were definitely inspirations. It’s an accurate description, too, in that the book is very much a family road trip novel with religious satire.

Bible World was inspired by real Christian attractions that I visited, like the Ark Encounter, the Holy Land Experience, and the Creationist Museum. But then I got to exaggerate and invent my own attractions like Noah’s Ark Park (a petting zoo), The DropTower of Babel, and the Sodom & Gomorrah roller coasters, complete with a plaster pillar of salt labeled “Lot’s Wife.”

Visit Eric Schlich's website.

The Page 69 Test: Eli Harpo's Adventure to the Afterlife.

My Book, The Movie: Eli Harpo's Adventure to the Afterlife.

--Marshal Zeringue