Interviews
by Mark Sieber

A Few Words With Douglas Clegg

Douglas Clegg is one of the best and most beloved authors of horror working today. He has extensively published to great acclaim in both the small press and in the mass market. His latest novel is a huge departure from his previous work in that it is a dark historical fantasy. The Priest of Blood has previously been published in a deluxe hardcover from Shocklines Press and is due in hardcover from Ace on October 4th.

HW: Doug, are you abandoning horror?

DC: The Priest of Blood has murder, war, vampyres, burnings, monstrous creatures with teeth like lampreys...and it's somehow not about horror because they don't put it on the spine of the book? Is dark fantasy far from horror?

I think what's generally interested me as a novelist has been the supernatural and the surreal and the disturbing. I believe there's plenty for a horror fan in The Priest of Blood and The Vampyricon, but when I sit down to write I do whatever I need to do to serve the story and go where it needs to go. So fantasy readers will also enjoy the novel, and I suspect mainstream readers will as well.

I've never understood the atittude that horror is just one thing. This is where the separate categorization of fiction has, I think, hurt all genres. When I was in my teens and twenties, you walked in a bookstore and all the fiction was together and you discovered various kinds of fiction. Now, you walk in and you practically have to be part of a club before you can find the books you might like. If you think you don't like mystery, you may never go to the mystery section and run across Ruth Rendell or P.D. James. If you think you don't like Young Adult fiction, you may never discover the brilliant horror writer, Robert Cormier.

HW: Do you plan to continue with the Andrew Harper books?

DC: I've written the Andrew Harper novels when I actually had an idea for the stories. This means that they can't follow anybody else's schedule -- I have to want to write one, and be in the right mood to write one. So I wrote one in 1996, one a few years later (Red Angel) and one a couple of years back, and these last two came out back-to-back. They're research-heavy novels that are very light reads -- by design. Not exactly my life's work, but a lot of fun to research and write.

So, short answer: I don't know. In researching hospitals for the criminally insane, if an idea sparks for me that would make a fun, fast-paced novel, I go with it. They're guilty pleasures to write and, I suspect, guilty pleasures to read. Nasty, fast-paced, and creepy.

HW: Do you think that readers familiar with your modern horror stories will follow you in this new direction?

DC: I can't second-guess readers. They read novels they like, and enjoy supernatural fiction. That's how I read, too, coincidentally.

So not only do I think they'll follow me over here with The Priest of Blood, I think they'll see it less as a new direction than a continuation of the kinds of stories I love writing.

HW: You are doing some interesting promo giveaways with The Priest of Blood. Can you tell our readers about them?

DC: Well, I really love collectible items, so we've made some Priest of Blood syringe pens -- already have given out about 500 of these. I'm probably most excited about the commercial being made -- for TV, some in-theater showings, and the Internet. Circle of Seven Productions is making it, and I've seen the storyboards -- it's a very gothic presentation, a genuine trailer for the book.

That should be up at www.DouglasClegg.com by mid-September.

Also, I'll be doing some very special audio, each week starting in September at the site, and will have several e-book excerpts from The Priest of Blood for people to read. My publisher Ace has designed some gorgeous ads for Cemetery Dance and various fantasy publications, and those will get out there in the fall. The Cemetery Dance ad is going to become a major collectible simply by virtue of it having Caniglia's phenomenal art in it as a four-page glossy insert spread in the magazine -- the first-ever.

There are other collectible goodies, too, but the one that I want to mention is the Collector's Card. This is a playing card-sized card with the cover of the book on one side, the limited edition cover on the other, and this is the "#1" card. I intend to make collector's cards for most of my upcoming fiction, so that a reader and fan can put together a collection over time. These won't be available for sale, but can be had if someone advance orders the book and then sends me the receipt once the book ships to them, and a self-addressed stamped envelope.

Or, if a participating bookstore is offering this preorder special, you can usually just get the Collector's Card and a special signed bookplate when you pick your order up. Shocklines.com is one of these participating bookstores. To find out more, folks can just drop by www.DouglasClegg.com or www.Vampyricon.com

HW: Will there be small press collector's editions of the rest of the Vampyricon novels?

DC: I am considering this, but haven't made any final decisions. I loved the first one that Shocklines Press did, and I definitely want to do this. But, I may not. I think I'm going to pull back quite a bit on the limited editions -- I love the ones that have been done, but I'd like to make each year a bit more special with fewer of them.

HW: You have an upcoming book out called Mordred, Bastard Son, which is the first in an all new series. Is this another historical fantasy?

DC: It's historical only if Mordred, King Arthur, Merlin, Guinevere, and Lancelot are historical. It's a Dark Ages fantasy, and although there are at least three scenes with dark supernatural touches -- a battle with demon-soldiers, a journey through the Otherworld, and three sisters who share one soul -- it's more fantasy than anything else. I had an idea as to why Mordred might not be as awful as they believed him to be, and I felt I could tell his story with some great degree of accuracy.

That is, if he existed.

HW: Isis is forthcoming in the Harrow Series of books. Are there more to
come after that?

DC: So far as I can tell, The Abandoned is the last full-length Harrow novel, but I'll never say never. One day, I may wake up and think, "What if, at Harrow..." and then race to my desk to start writing a new tale.

I conceived of the Harrow novels as my way of letting it all out with hauntings, using one house and its history as the crucible for this so that it was the place of infinite possibilities for haunts. So, there may yet be more, but for the next couple of years at least, beyond the Isis novelette from Cemetery Dance Publications, I don't know.

To me, each Harrow novel has been a very different kind of novel, and Nightmare House is the very opposite kind of horror novel from The Abandoned. Interestingly, Nightmare House in paperback -- a very short novel -- sold through the roof. This surprised me to no end, because it is so quiet, so understated, so not what a lot of the horror genre seems to be at the moment. I didn't expect that, and I'd love to write some more quiet, very mainstream horror novels -- it's nice to know readers took to it so I'm not alone in my enjoyment of it.

HW: You are known primarily for supernatural fiction. What are your own
views on the paranormal?

DC: I think belief and the human imagination are important to life -- both for the great and the terrible. Even people I know who think they hold no beliefs, have beliefs -- they just don't categorize them as supernatural, although (to me) if you believe that other people's beliefs are wrong -- that, in itself, is a belief in something unseen.

I believe that there are things unseen, simply because I don't believe we know everything, nor can we. There will always be that thing "beyond."

Having said that, I don't have all the answers. I'm an explorer and an interested observer. I am attracted to world mythologies, no matter what religion it calls itself, and those mythologies always profess a greater world than our own, a greater source than our physical bodies, and a greater awareness of fate and deliverance than simply life and death -- and they seem to be mirrors and metaphors for the experience of being alive. These are sparks for the imagination, and I love journeying through this.

HW: You have one of the friendliest websites of any writer I know and your newsletters are intimate and a lot of fun. Do you feel that Internet promotion is critical to a writer's success in today's market?

DC: No, I don't. But Internet communication is probably the most cost-effective way to reach readers of fiction.

I just like to do it. It gives me an outlet and a way to communicate with people who give me permission to drop them notes.

I think what's critical to a writer's sucess is writing a really good story, having a really good publisher get it out there well, and then having a really good bookseller attract readers to it -- and that's it.

HW: Finally, where do you see the Horror Fiction genre in five years?

DC: Five years? Ok, let's have fun with this one:

Leisure, Berkley, and Bantam now do a line of hardcover horror fiction -- 12 per year at each house. The new HWA antho sells for a record million to HarperCollins when Stephen King agrees to contribute The Mist II.

Horror fiction becomes so popular that the NY Times has to split off "Horror" as its own category like they did for children's books when Harry Potter books continually outsold all adult fiction.

Matt Schwartz and Shocklines.com, the first independent bookseller online to become a multimillionaire, creates and endows the first "World Horror Library," in Manhattan, with a museum to the genre as well as the complete works of all horror fiction and nonfiction. Mary Elizabeth Hart and Jeff Mariotte have a chain of Mysterious Galaxy in every major city; Borderlands Books in San Francisco now buys Simon & Schuster and renames it...Beatts Publishing; Del and Sue Howison have six stores in the Valley, and have just produced the hit movie, Goat Dance; Necon now owns Roger Williams University, plows down the dorms and builds some great high-rise luxury apartments and does Necon for a full month every summer and fall, HorrorWorld.org strikes a deal with HBO to create a 24 episode anthology series horror show called...Horror World...okay, I could go on.

Realistically? Who knows?

It's just up to the writers to keep writing, fiercely, into what they believe a good story is.

HW: Thanks Doug, and best of luck with all the upcoming projects!

Note: I've read the limited edition of The Priest of Blood. I'm one of those people that "don't like fantasy", but I loved it. It's not only as compelling as anything Douglas Clegg has published, it is possibly his best and most rewarding work to date.