Nightmare Magazine Issue 6

by Molly Tanzer

  Did any of them beg you to kill them?

  Actually, most of them were pretty adamant that I did not. But I did give each of them action scenes—they all get to kick a little ass. It was fun to have Tom Savini kill a vampire, because he’s just a badass little guy. He’s one of those guys that if the apocalypse happens, I’m pretty sure he’s going to get through it on general crankiness alone. He’s great.

  You have a background in martial arts, and the Joe Ledger books feature some of the best descriptions around of fights (and have raised the bar on action in horror novels). Was being able to pack a horror novel with your own fighting skills one of the reasons for writing Patient Zero (the first Joe Ledger novel)?

  It isn’t the reason I write them—it’s the reason martial arts is in them. I’m a fight scene snob. You can kill my interest in something really quickly with a bad fight scene. For example, the movie Taken, with Liam Neeson—the first two-thirds of it, the fight choreography is brilliant. It’s exactly the way a tall, middle-aged man would fight, because a tall, middle-aged man would fight differently than a tall young man. Then he starts dodging machine-gun bullets and it all falls apart. I’ve had forty-eight years in jujitsu and kenjutsu, I was a bodyguard, I was a bouncer, I was a martial arts instructor, I created self-defense programs for women, for the visually impaired, for the physically challenged, for kids, I was the Philadelphia D.A.’s office expert witness for murder cases involving martial arts, and also I ran a company called CopSafe, which taught arrest and control workshops to all levels of law enforcement, including SWAT. Jujitsu is all about physics. Physics will overcome brawn every time. So I draw all that in there. Everything that Joe Ledger does is possible, and a lot of that I have done, although I have not killed anyone. I have dented a few people. I also have quite a few friends in SWAT and in Special Forces, and after I write an action scene they usually vet it for me. Any technical errors that show up in gunplay are mine because I’m just not an experienced handgun expert. When I was a bodyguard, I carried a revolver and never pulled it. So there may be a few little technical errors there, but the hand-to-hand stuff—that’s all real.

  When you’re asked to write something like The Wolfman movie novelization, do you feel like your own style is sometimes in conflict with the pre-existing material?

  It was a funny thing that happened with that. First of all, the way that I got that project was that I’m sitting at home on a Saturday night, and I get a call from someone claiming to be the Vice President of Licensing for Universal Pictures. I thought I was being punked by one of my friends—I have friends who will do that sort of thing. It turned out that her assistant was one of my fans on Facebook, having read the Pine Deep novels, which have a werewolf in them. She asked me if I’d ever heard of The Wolf Man, and I said, “Really?” Then she asked me if I knew they were remaking it (which I actually didn’t know at the time) with Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins. I said, “That’s really cool,” and she said, “Would you be interested in possibly novelizing the script?” I had never done a novelization. Now, the weird thing is, I didn’t know that you don’t get to see even a rough cut of the movie. In fact, I didn’t see the movie until a week after the book was in stores. I saw five production stills—no, actually production sketches. You can’t just wrap a paragraph around a line from the script and call it a novel, so I asked them, “What do you expect me to do to get a story here?” And she said, “Well, you’re a novelist—write a novel.” I had never written a novel in the classic gothic style before, so I did. I did research into the era, everything from the economy to the styles to the foods and everything else. Did my research, and then wrote a gothic novel. Built a couple of motifs in there about the masks we wear, because he’s a Shakespearean actor, about the beast within, about the goddess of the hunt (because the moon is the symbol of the goddess of the hunt), and I wrote a gothic novel. I had fun with it. It was my first New York Times bestseller. It sold a gazillion copies, and it went on to win the Scribe Award for Best Movie Adaptation, which thoroughly floored me. I knew I was on the nomination list, but I thought it was kind of a token thing. . .and I won. It was stunning. I was so surprised.

  Now one of the things that happened—it’s kind of unfortunate for Universal but great for me—when they gave the press kits out, they included the novel in the press kit, and the critics hated the movie and loved the book. They kept saying in all of the reviews, “Don’t watch the movie—read the book.” That is a little unfair, because the movie’s not terrible. But in the edit, they simply went in the direction of the gore, and left behind some of the beautiful subtleties that were in David Self’s original script. They also did something else that appalls me as a geek: the makeup effects were Rick Baker—American Werewolf in London—and they CGI’ed over Rick Baker! It’s like putting a drop ceiling in the Sistine Chapel. Rick Baker?! It was the reason I would’ve gone to see that film.

  Is it ever hard to switch gears between something like one of the Benny Imura young adult zombie novels and the more adult Joe Ledger books?

  I have a trick for switching gears: I go to a different Starbuck’s. I call myself a “caffeine nomad.” I’ll go to one Starbuck’s, and they know which table I like, so if they know I’m coming in they’ll make sure my table is set aside—that’s nice. I usually work on one project in the morning, and then I’ll go to the gym or whatever, then I’ll go to another Starbuck’s in the afternoon and I’ll work a different project. But sometimes you don’t have that luxury—you finish one project, and bang, you’ve got to go right onto something else. The thing that’s the buffer zone—that allows me to change—is ten minutes out of each hour I do social media. I’ll do fifty minutes of writing and ten minutes of social media. You have to do the social media, and doing it in that orderly fashion allows me to get things done, but it’s also a great way to change direction.

  Is part of the appeal of zombies that they allow authors to create heroes who can act out our secret fantasies?

  Except in very rare cases, zombie stories are not about zombies. Warm Bodies is, yes, but it’s a zombie becoming human. And Scott Browne’s excellent Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament, but it’s deliberately a satire. But in the scary zombie stories, the zombies do not have a personality—unlike vampire stories, where the vampire has become the story (so much so that it’s no longer about the humans in the story—Bella’s family dynamic is far less interesting than Edward’s). As a result vampire fiction has stopped being scary, because the more you go into the monster, the less scary the monster is. It’s kind of like in monster movies—by the time you see the monster, it’s shifted from horror to thriller. Jaws is a horror movie up until you see the shark, then it’s a thriller. With zombies, we have a totally different thing: You never get inside the zombie’s head, except in very rare cases. The zombie is established as a massive, immediate shared threat. Every character is propelled into that, and as a result every character’s personal life is shattered, their personal affect is torn away, and they have to deal with this threat. Which means that the focus of our story is about people dealing with a problem . . . and that’s drama right there. We don’t tell stories about people having a good day; we tell stories about people having a terrible day, a day that will challenge them so they can rise above it. Even if you have a love story, it’s all about boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl crisis. It’s all about crisis, calamity, catastrophe, conundrum . . . a lot of “c” words.

  So the zombie stories allow us to tell stories of people in real crisis, and it’s one of the reasons it’s so easy to use zombie stories as metaphors for anything else—I can’t imagine any fear not being able to be told as a zombie story. It’s also why the genre will never die. We’re not rehashing George Romero; George Romero told his story. Max Brooks told his story. Joe McKinney told his story. I tell my stories . . . and they’re all different.

  You’ve written more short stories than many of your fans might realize . . .

  I ha
ve, but they’re not all in horror. I think the second short story I was asked to write was military science fiction, and this was even before the Joe Ledger novels. The invitation was just based on Ghost Road Blues, and I was like, “Really? Military science fiction?” So I did it. I did a historical zombie story—my first short story was for Kim Paffenroth’s History is Dead, which was a historical zombie anthology, and I did a comedy zombie story, “Pegleg and Paddy Save the World.” Since then, I’ve done steampunk short stories, I’ve done a weird western for John Joseph Adams—a weird west ghost story—I did an Auguste Dupin story for an anthology of Edgar Allan Poe-inspired stories using that character, I did an Oz story—it’s the first story I’ve ever written where nobody dies. It’s a charming little tale about a little girl winged monkey whose wings are too small, so she goes to a town to buy some traveling shoes, and they happen to be the silver slippers, but a damaged version of the silver slippers. I’ve done a Cthulhu story recently—it was a long-term dream of mine to write a Cthulhu story!—and just all sorts of things. So the reason most people don’t know about my short stories is they’re all over the place—detective stories, Sherlock Holmes stories . . . and I love it, because as a writer it’s an opportunity to stretch. I have a great dislike of writers who pigeonhole themselves; I think the writers are short shrifting themselves. When I was a kid, one of the things Richard Matheson said to me was, “A writer writes.” That’s the only definition that you should give yourself—you’re a writer. To tell the truth, it’s also one of the reasons I’m making money at this. Because people know they can come to me, and offer a project, and if I think the deal is right for me I’ll do it. It doesn’t matter if it’s outside my wheelhouse; a lot of other writers will say, “It’s not my kind of thing.” If somebody asked me to write a romance story, I’d write a romance story if I thought I could bring game to it. I just don’t like to accept the fact that a writer—any writer—will willingly accept a limitation. I just think that’s bad.

  You also created and edited the anthology V Wars. Was it interesting editing other writers?

  It was. And to be clear, I edit content—I do not edit grammar or spelling or anything else, because I’m a product of the Philadelphia school system and not their best example. But I edited content, and I loved it. That was a shared world thing; I created the concept, which was polar ice is melting and it releases a bacteria that triggers dormant genes, and those genes happen to be what originally caused vampirism. The first people who had that gene were hunted to extinction, in witch hunts and so forth, and now people are becoming vampires again, so it creates a race war and so on. I love the concept—it’s hard science, we got some good science in there, and I reached out to some of my favorite writers. Writers who I thought not that they’d all be able to write in this style, but writers whose styles were different. Nancy Holder, James A. Moore, John Everson, Scott Nicholson, Yvonne Navarro, Keith R.A. DeCandido and Gregory Frost—even though they’re all in horror and fantasy, they’re in no way alike. I love that vibe. I told them the set-up and then I just let them go. When they gave me their stories, we made some development changes or edits that kept it in line with what other people were writing. A couple of them kind of crossed the line into supernatural and we had to bring them back, because it’s not a supernatural kind of story. It’s really a nod to Richard Matheson—it’s science fiction about vampires. Some of these writers I was reading long before I considered writing my first horror stories. It’s a very humbling thing when you’re editing someone who inspired you to write in the first place. Scott Nicholson, for example—I love Scott’s writing, and he and Gary Braunbeck are probably the two modern writers whose work drew me into writing horror. I absolutely love both of their writing, and I wanted to be them—more so than I wanted to be Stephen King or Peter Straub. It was a real pleasure and an honor to do it, and the book came out beautifully. It’s being pitched to television right now, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed.

  Is there a dream project for you?

  Yeah, and it’s probably not what you would expect. I would love to write a literary novel about a writers’ colony—I’ve got one cooking in my head. I’ve got several dream projects: I want to write a good old-fashioned action-western, a Louis L’Amour-style western. I love westerns, and I would love to write one. My grandfather-in-law was a pulp fiction writer and he wrote westerns, as well as other things. I’d love to re-start the Doc Savage series, but as Doc Savage’s son or something. . .but I’ll never get the rights to do it. And probably one of the things that I most want to do is write a straight-up noir-mystery. I’m playing with it a little bit with an urban-fantasy character Sam Hunter, who I introduced originally in a short story and I liked the character. I wanted to do a novel—I didn’t quite have a novel in my head, but I had a lot of stories in my head. Then when Christopher Payne and Anne Petty asked me to do something for the first Limbus, Inc. book, I took one of my ideas and did a novella from that. It’s very noir, and it’s also smartass—I’ve been accused of being a smartass, and I have no counter-argument on that one—but also I’m going to be writing novellas on that character for the next two Limbus books. I’ve got eight short stories and novellas for that character in one- or two-sentence pitches in my head, so I want to write more of that character. It’s noir, and I love noir. Except for what I read for cover quotes, I probably read more detective fiction and police procedurals than anything else, including some that cross the line over into horror, like John Connolly. I love the scientific, methodical, but also dark and moody approach to solving crimes, so I want to do that.

  But I don’t think there isn’t a genre that I wouldn’t want to take a swing at just for fun. If I had the time, I’d do a thousand novels a year, not for the money but because I just want to play in all these different playgrounds.

  Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of nonfiction books, award-winning prose writer, and Halloween expert whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” Her short fiction has appeared in dozens of anthologies and magazines, including The Mammoth Book of Dracula, Dark Delicacies, The Museum of Horrors, and Cemetery Dance, and in 2010 her first novel, The Castle of Los Angeles, received the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel. Recent books include the graphic novel Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times (co-written with Rocky Wood, illustrated by Greg Chapman), and Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween. Forthcoming in 2013 are the novellas Summer’s End and Smog, and the novel Malediction. A lifelong Californian, she lives in North Hollywood, and can be found online at www.lisamorton.com.

  Author Spotlight: Molly Tanzer

  Lisa Nohealani Morton

  “The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins” is a sort of eighteenth-century take on Lovecraftian horror. What sparked you to write a story combining the two?

  Two things, mainly. I had watched Barry Lyndon, that old Kubrick film with Ryan O’Neal, and during the . . . let’s be diplomatic and say “less exciting” parts of the film (of which there are quite a few) I found myself contemplating what it might mean to combine the picaresque with necromancy. I find necromancy an entertaining profession, I love eighteenth century-style narratives, and I adore shady heroes, so it seemed a natural combination.

  So anyway, I had that in the back of my head when I happened to see that Innsmouth Free Press was putting out an anthology called Historical Lovecraft, and I still had a few weeks until the deadline. I can’t really explain it, but something just fell into place for me about the project when I thought about combining my former mess of ideas with Lovecraftian horror. Usually I’m not the kind of writer who has eureka-in-the-bathtub moments, but in this case, it really was.

  You’ve recently released a collection of stories chronicling the peculiar histories of the Calipash family. Will readers discover anything more about the lives of Basil and Rosemary in the book? Can we look forward to more Calipash
stories in the future?

  A Pretty Mouth contains five Calipash stories. “The Infernal History” is reprinted there, as is “The Hour of the Tortoise,” which first appeared in The Book of Cthulhu II. The other three are originals (including the title piece, which is a short novel).

  When Cameron Pierce (my editor at Lazy Fascist Press) first contacted me after reading “The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins,” asking if I’d thought about writing more about the Calipash family, I pitched him the idea of doing a collection, with each of the stories being set during a different time period in English history. I had been watching a lot of Blackadder at the time. He had been, too, as it turned out, so he thought it was a swell idea. So, no, nothing directly new about Basil and Rosemary, just their past and future family members—though the stories do provide a broader perspective on those Infernal Twins.

  As to whether there will be more Calipash stories, very probably! I don’t have any planned right now, but I can’t imagine I’ll be able to go too long without my Lovecraftian horror/English lit fix . . .

  “The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins” interlaces nameless Lovecraftian horror with a certain amount of sly humor. Do you find it difficult to mix horror and humor, or do you find the two go together naturally?