Angel of Death

by J. Robert King

  Why couldn’t I have had that thought about something good?

  I also remember having a nightmare when I was four and getting up and turning on Johnny Carson. It suddenly seemed like everything was okay. I remember my Grandpa Bennett sitting in the rocking chair at our house. I pulled on the back of it and nearly tipped him over. Later, when he died of a burst aorta, I remember lying in bed and looking at the ceiling and trying to imagine him just not existing anymore.

  First story you told?

  Aslan vs Caplaner was the first story I told on paper, but there were a lot of stories (lies) told orally. When I was five, I came home from kindergarten and got my brother’s hamster, Herman (named after Herman Munster), from his cage. I put the little guy in my sock drawer and got changed out of my school clothes. When I reached into the sock drawer to get him, Herman was dead. I put him back in the cage and had to wait with dread as my older brother came home and checked in with his pet. “Her-man? Her-man? How you doing, little buddy? What’s wrong Herman? How come you’re not moving?…” I didn’t tell my brother of my involvement in the death until we were in the parking lot after buying Herman II. Then my brother punched me. When I was about eleven, I convinced the 9 year-old nextdoor neighbors that I had magical powers. I did so by “sensing” things under the ground: “It feels like – what? A backhoe? That’s crazy! A backhoe’s too big. Still, we’ll have to dig to find out!” And it was a backhoe – a toy that I’d buried a year before because I was sick of finding it in my yard.

  When I was thirteen, I wasn’t sure how to talk to girls in my junior high, so I thought I should just jump to proposing. I proposed to Karen Baker in Home Economics – and was delighted when she accepted. I then proposed to Michelle Desmitt in Algebra and a few others in other classes. Soon, I had many wives and was feeling grand – until they found out about each other and decided to divorce me.

  First story you sold?

  I wrote an SF story called “Death of a God,” which was published in Amazing magazine in 1992. It’s a great story about the collision between biological and digital realities. I still remember the note written by the assistant editor: “Bob can write!”

  Next book you’ll read?

  I’m currently reading The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett.

  What do you say when people ask “Where do you get your ideas from?”

  Ideas don’t come from a place. They come from an attitude, from a habitual curiosity and restlessness. Ideas are the result of a mental agitation. They come like butterflies. Like mosquitoes. They are everywhere. Catching an idea is no harder than feeling something bite you and smacking it and seeing the dead thing on your hand and the blood it had drawn out of you.

  Do you have an unusual talent or skill?

  I’m an actor as well as a writer. I most enjoy roles that allow me to play multiple characters, and to do so comedically. In that regard, the best shows I have been in are The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) and No Way to Treat a Lady. In the first play, I was Juliet, Othello, Hamlet’s mother, Ophelia, Claudius, and a number of other characters. In the second, I played eight different parts, alter-egos of the serial killer Kit Gill.

  Best place you ever visited?

  In college, I loved Edinburgh – a modern city with a medieval castle in the middle, and Arthur’s Seat at the outskirts. I watched guys digging clams on the shore of the Firth of Forth.

  As a young married man, I loved Susie’s Sunshine Cafe in Bloomington, Illinois. It was a seventies throwback without trying, with great food and slow service, perfect for sitting with my wife for a couple hours on a Friday night.

  When I was a young dad, I loved the Milwaukee Public Museum – natural history. I took my sons there once a month and taught them about dinosaurs and ice-age mammals, about the rain forest and the streets of old Milwaukee. Touring that place was like touring the world.

  Now, I like the screened-in front porch of my old house. It’s where I write my books, watching the world pass by on the sidewalks and streets and hearing my family rattle on in the warm rooms within.

  Favourite building or structure?

  I like old buildings. I love Jerusalem for that reason. It’s actually a 400-year-old Turkish city built on top of two-thousand years worth of other ruins. To get to the streets where Jesus walked, you had to go seventy feet down.

  And I love England for the same reason – Roman foundations with a Norman layer and an Elizabethan layer and then surveillance cameras mounted on top. In the US we have a short history, and we like to ignore it. We like to say that all that matters is right now. But I bought a hundred-ten year-old Victorian house with original clapboards and hodgepodge wiring and only one bathroom. And this house stands near effigy mounds that are three thousand years old. Imagine that. The people buried in those mounds lived a thousand years before Jesus. In Jericho, I saw a tower that was six thousand years old. Older than the pyramids. That was awesome.

  The last time you cried?

  Whenever somebody does the right thing unselfishly, I cry. I wish I cried every day, but it’s more like twice a year.

  I have a son with special needs, and I was worried about him getting bullied on the playground. Then we got a report from the school that a bunch of bullies were picking on another kid – one in a wheelchair – and my son ran up and drove them off and stood guard over the kid and comforted him.

  Are you kidding me? My son? The one who was supposed to be the victim became the hero?

  If you weren’t a writer what would you be?

  In junior high, a career aptitude test told me I should be a forklift operator, so I guess I have a fall-back. People used to tell me I should be a lawyer because I love to argue. But I don’t love it anymore. Arguing is like arm-wrestling. It doesn’t show who’s right, but just who has the bigger arm.

  Favourite fancy dress costume?

  My wife and I once went as Romeo and Juliet to a costume party benefit for our local community theater. Yes, Jennie was Romeo, and I was Juliet.

  Got an irritating/bad habit?

  I’m not sure this counts as a bad habit: it’s more of a character flaw.

  You can categorize people’s personalities based on the four Aristotelian elements – earth, air, water, and fire. My brother Al is earth: solid, unmoving, dependable, but prone to quakes. My cousin Jim is air: buoyant, light, able to fit around anyone anywhere, but prone to occasional tempests. My friend Don is water: patient, pervading, shifting, always seeking its level, but prone to floods.

  I am fire. Insatiable. Consuming. Producing light and heat but doing so by destroying. I burn up everything and leaped hungrily forward. If I stop moving, I die.

  What keeps you awake at night?

  Not much keeps me awake at night. I put my pillow over my head and sleep like the dead. In fact, someday, they’ll find me dead in bed and rule it “feather inhalation.”

  Favourite word?

  My favorite word is curious. It can describe someone who wants to find out something or something that wants to be found out. “Are you curious about this curious artifact?”

  Curiosity can mean the desire to know or something desiring to be known. “I feel a strange curiosity about this curiosity.” It’s the signature strength of our race. We are the curious people, in all senses of the term.

  Who plays you in the movie?

  I’d like to be played by Robert Downey, Jr. Here’s a really smart, talented, and troubled guy. And he weighs about seventy pounds less than I.

  What Downey delivers onscreen, great as it is, is about a tenth of what he’s got inside him. It comes from having struggled. I can empathize.

  One of the deadliest challenges is transitioning from youth to middle age. People who don’t make the transition don’t survive. Think of Michael Jackson and Marilyn Monroe and Heath Ledger. Downey and I have made the ungraceful transition. He’s also got a great ironic wit and the desire to make fun of himself.

 
; And what’s the pivotal scene?

  The pivotal scene in my life is when I decided to be a human being first and an artist second. There are plenty of writers and painters and dancers and actors who made the opposite choice. A lot of the best ones did. But I can’t listen to John Lennon singing about love for the world as he simultaneously abandons his own son. So, the point is this – I brought three lives into this world. It’s more important that they have great lives than that I do. They are my greatest works, my legacy. The critics will gloat that I was no Hemingway. So will my family.

  Last dream of note?

  I have all kinds of big dreams. The end of racism. The end of extremism. A global age of reason and justice. You know…

  I have all kinds of small dreams, too. I dream that our new young hamster will nurse her babies instead of eating them. I dream that the new dishwasher will actually get things clean. I dream that Angel of Death will reach a smart audience who gets it.

  Favourite item of clothing?

  I most happily wear anything that has been washed over a hundred times. The number of washings shows I like it and also guarantees that the thing is soft and shaped like me.

  What’s the view from your writing window?

  For nine months out of the year, I sit on a padded wicker loveseat on the screened-in porch of my 1902 Victorian house in Burlington, Wisconsin. It’s a perfect place, with people and cars passing by and cats happening in and the sounds of the house close enough that I am still involved but far enough that I am not distracted. There’s a big football game going on just now, three blocks away at Catholic Central, and I hear the cheers and the band and the big bell tolling the hour. It’s about perfect.

  Would you write full-time if you could?

  Oh, yes. I did for almost eight years, just after my first child was born. I took care of him and his brothers all through their early years, potty training them while writing novels. It was the best thing I’ve ever done and the best thing I will ever do.

  But it was also grueling. To be the primary caregiver of three boys in diapers while trying to write full-time was a huge challenge. When I finally returned to the regular workforce, I was amazed how much work I could accomplish without a baby in my lap and two others crawling over my shoulders.

  Do you plan in detail or set off hopefully?

  There are two different approaches to writing. Some people build a book the same way that they would build a house. They make blueprints. They order supplies. They schedule construction. Then, brick by brick, they lay out the book.

  Others grow a book the same way that they would plant a garden. They turn over the ground and buy some seeds and shove them in the dirt and pour water on them and see what comes up. Weeds, of course, but they cull those and nurture the actual plants and work to make something out of it.

  I call the first way of writing the structural approach and the second the organic approach. Both have their strengths and weaknesses.

  People who build books like bricklayers have to reach a point where the book comes alive – where it lives and breathes.

  People who grow books like gardeners have to reach a point where a book has structure and form and isn’t just rampant weeds.

  I write books in both ways. Angel of Death was a grown book. My next one was built to specifications. The one I am writing right now, Death’s Disciples, is grown as well.

  Where would you like to be right now?

  Right now, I’d like to be shaking the hand of the person who is giving me the Pulitzer for Angel of Death. Failing that, I’m happy to sit here being interviewed by Angry Robot Books.

  When & where were you happiest?

  My wife recently co-directed Sugar –the musical based on Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot. The show was fantastic. I laughed myself hoarse. That was a moment of absolute happiness, enjoying the performance and reveling in my wife’s success and delighting in great acting and writing and music and staging and choreography. Excellence thrills me, and this show was a tour de force.

  I was also so transfixed watching a Florentine Opera production of Turondot. Again, excellence. But I get the same pleasure when a Mexican mechanic rides in my minivan and figures out what that terrible pounding sound is and fixes it in three hours. That’s a maestro. And when a carpenter comes to look at the sagging front porch of my house and tells me how he is going to lift it up in two hours. Genius. There are all kinds of intelligence. I’m brilliant with words, but with tools, I have special needs. I’m happiest when I see people with extraordinary skills using those skills in an extraordinary way.

  Complete this sentence: Rewriting is...

  Rewriting is when the two halves of the mind meet. Writing the first draft is done by the child mind, the id. Think Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes. This part of the mind is convinced that it is a genius whose every impulse is worthy of adulation. This part of the mind creates effortlessly, certain that anything it imagines is worthy to exist.

  Rewriting, or revision, is done by the parental mind, the superego. Think of Calvin’s longsuffering parents. They love their son, but they are the reality principles, the ones who have to figure out what part of Calvin’s genius is genius and what part simply does not belong in the world.

  When you write a first draft, you have to engage the child mind, the generative mind that creates with broad strokes and broader grins. When you revise, you have to engage the parental mind, the criticizing mind that analyzes and evaluates and decides what should remain and what should be destroyed.

  The child without the parent is lost and hopeless. The parent without the child is empty and pointless. Writers need to encourage both minds, and engage each when it should be engaged.

  Complete this sentence: Blogging is.. .

  Blogging is web logging; that is to say, writing a journal or diary that once would have been locked with a key but now is for the whole world to see. When people used to lock away their words, other people really did want to read them (pesky little brothers, mostly). Now that blogging is journaling to the masses, people aren’t that interested. It’s like everybody’s leaving their diaries lying all over the house.

  Complete this sentence: I owe it all to...

  I was going to say I owe it all to Visa, but we just got it paid off.

  I really owe it all to my parents and grandparents. My grandfather was abandoned by his father at three years old and lost his mother when he was in eighth grade. Grandpa Frank went from being a penniless orphan to having his own print shop. My father put himself through college by saving up his paperroute money. He became an electrical engineer, moving from working class to solidly middle class. I am now struggling to move from middle class to upper class by writing novels. So far, I’ve been less successful than my father or grandfather.

  Tell us a secret

  Sarah Silverman and I were both bedwetters. If I ever meet her, I hope to use this fact as a pickup line.

  What are you going to do right now when you’ve finished this ordeal?

  I am going to wrestle the sleeping bags down from the attic so that my youngest son and his guest can sleep downstairs away from the maternal hamster, and that my oldest sons can sleep out here on the screenedin porch of our old Victorian.

  Table of Contents

  BOOK I

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  BOOK II

  TEN

  E L E V E N

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  SON OF SAMAEL SLAYS CELL MATE

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  DEFENSE MAKES MAN OF MONSTER

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  BOOK III

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  SON OF SAMAEL KILLS THREE IN A THREE-DAY SP
REE

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Extras

  TWENTY MINUTES WITH