William Gibson Globe and Mail Story "I'm owning Rydell's awareness of its banality. It probably had something to do with being southern. For some reason, I've been much more conscious of that over the last few years. It's probably because my friend Jack Womak has a thesis that he and I write the way we do because we're southern and we experienced the very tail end of the premeditated south, in a culture that violence had always been a part of. It wasn't an aberration, though I realise that in retrospect, it was. I grew up in the part of the U.S. where all of Cormack McCarthy's novels are set -- that's a pretty violent place. There's violence in my culture. It's an American thing, but it's particularly a southern thing, and its romanticization is hyper-southern. And it's still irresistible to me, even in middle age. There's something that pulls me to that, but at the same time, I have this increasing awareness of how banal it really is -- that evil is inherently banal."

William Gibson, on the banality of Southern Violence.