Interviews
by Angela Bennet

A Few Words With Gary Braunbeck

 

Gary is one of the hardest working authors in the business, he is the author of over 200 published short stories, as well as the novels The Indifference of Heaven, Prodigal Blues, In Hollow Houses, and his most recent release, Keepers. Published collections include Things Left Behind; From Beneath These Fields of Blood; Sorties, Cathexes, and Personal Effects; Graveyard People: The collected Cedar Hill Stories, Volume1; and Home Before Dark: The Collected Cedar Hill Stories, Vol. 2. Gary has won the HWA's Bram Stoker Award and his work has been nominated for the International Horror Guild Award.

HW: Where do you see the future of horror?

GB: If - I'll repeat that - if writers and publishers continue to take chances with less obviously commercial works, I think the horror field could expand well beyond the boundaries of its popular definition by the end of the decade. While there's always going to be a readership for hardcore traditional horror - and let's face it, that's the bread and butter of most horror publishers - you've got houses like Leisure and Bantam, to name a couple, that are publishing writers like Tim Waggoner, Tom Piccirilli, and Tim Lebbon, writers who, like Peter Straub, can weave a mesmerizing and unsettling horror story while simultaneously exercising a lot of genuinely literary muscle without apologizing for it. These are writers who take chances both narratively and structurally with their work, who experiment and push those so-called boundaries a little further outward with each book. As long as there are writers like them out there, and publishers who are willing to mix in the experimental and non-traditional with their catalogues, the field's going to continue to evolve. And if you think the crop of newer writers are going to be content to just sit back and rework traditional tropes in traditional ways, then pick up either of Sarah Pinborough's novels, or grab a copy of Teresa Pampellonne's The Unwelcome Child, or the dazzling cross-genre novels of Deborah LeBlanc. The horror field is quite healthy in that you can find more and more chances being taken by more and more writers. And if - the Fates forbid - this resurgence of horror's popularity starts to wane in the mass marketplace, the specialty press will always be here, keeping horror alive as it did after the bust of the late 1980's.

HW: What was the inspiration for your new novel Keepers?

GB: There was no single inspiration or experience that served as the catalyst. Like most of my story ideas, it was the result of several disparate elements that I'd been mentally cataloguing for years that one day suddenly found they were all connected. In this case, it began with a series of cartoons in MAD Magazine about people who look like their pets - funny as hell, because the more the series advanced, the more it became impossible to tell the owner's face apart from that of their pet's. This series of cartoons was then turned on its head in my mind with that wonderful moment in the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers when you see the dog with the man's head attached to it. A few years later, I had the unpleasant experience of having to help a friend of mine take 3 of her pets to a no-kill shelter that was the inspiration for the Keepers facility in the novel. While we were there dropping off the pets, someone came out of a door marked Restricted Access, saw us there, and all but ran back into the room, locking the door behind them. I remember thinking, "What don't they want us to see back there?" Then I began to notice that the day-today routines of nursing homes bore a startling similarity to those of these no-kill shelters, connections started getting made, the right synapses fired, and all of a sudden all of these seemingly unrelated elements came together and tag-teamed my ass, announcing that they were a story ready to be written; the result was Keepers, what has turned out to be the second in thematic trilogy about abuse. (The first being In Silent Graves, the last being Mr. Hands, an expansion of my novella of the same name, that will be appearing in 2007 from Leisure.)

HW: What challenges do you see facing new authors today?

GB: To not be a watered-down version of their greatest influences (we don't need another Stephen King or Dean Koontz imitator), to not feel that they have to deal only with those subjects that are popular at the moment, to not resort to unnecessary gore and violence because they think readers need a goddamn decapitation or evisceration every 20 pages in a novel, and, most of all, to not shy away from dealing with darker emotional content. Take a look at Tim Lebbon's magnificent Berserk (a novel that makes my stuff look like a Disney film); if Tim hadn't been willing to crawl down into the darkest pits of grief in the first two-thirds of that novel, its nearly unbearable final third could have come across as just a sadistic gorefest; but because he took the time to grapple with some of the deepest and darkest aspect of the human psyche crumbling under the weight of inconsolable grief, the final third of Berserk reached near-operatic levels of tragedy.

Which leads me to another challenge for new authors; understanding the difference between what is "tragic" and genuine tragedy, tragedy in the Shakespearian sense of the word. Genuine tragedy emerges from some flaw in a character's core - witness the end of King's Pet Sematary: even though the main character knows that people and things come back from the dead evil as hell, even though he's seen it first-hand, even though part of him knows it's a mistake to bury his wife there, his love for her (which has been shown to sometimes blind him to the consequences of his actions) compels him to do it, anyway. And everyone remembers how that turned out. Genuine tragedy emerges because of a fatal flaw in your character. I wish more new writers realized that.

HW: What do you consider to be your greatest challenge as an author?

GB: To not let what I do be the sole standard against which I measure my worth as a human being. If you reach a point in your life and career where you define yourself only as "a writer", then you're committing suicide on the installment plan; if that's the only way you can relate to others, then your life is going to become more and more circumscribed by ever-diminishing emotional and social boundaries, and you're going to wake up one day to discover that, yes, you've published lots of stuff, and lots of people have read it, and like it, but outside of that, your days don't carry a lot of meaning. This is something I fight against on a daily basis. For too many years - hell, for the better part of three decades - I've defined myself as being "a writer" and little else. It's only been in the past few years that I've begun to realize what a mistake that has been.

HW: How do you feel about on-line advertising and street teams? Do you think that they help or hinder an author?

GB: I think they help a great deal. Look at the success Joe Nassise has seen with his terrific novel Heretic as a result of on-line advertising and employing street teams to spread the word; he's got a book that's selling well, that people are talking about, that has now been sold to (I think) at least 3 foreign-language publishers, is being serialized for Podcasts via The Horror Channel, is being adapted into a comic book series, and possibly a video game.

Everyone who uses this method of getting the word out about their books owes a large debt to Douglas Clegg, who as far as I'm concerned was the first horror writer to show everyone the power of the Internet to promote one's work.

HW: What new works will we see from Gary Braunbeck in 2006?

GB: I'll have stories in several new anthologies: Poe's Lighthouse, Midnight Premiere, Shadow Regions, Aim for the Head, The Cthulhian Singularity, Lords of the Razor, and Masques 5 (which I co-edited with the late J.N. Williamson). Cemetery Dance Publications will be releasing my collection Destinations Unknown, and hopefully they'll also be releasing my novel Prodigal Blues, as well, if the schedule allows.

HW: Are there any characters in your work that you feel closest to?

GB: The narrator of "Safe" has always been close to my heart, as has my recurring character of The Reverend from the Cedar Hill stories - this guy has been revealing his true nature to me in slow degrees, and that nature will be revealed to readers in the final Cedar Hill story, "This Dark March" when the final Cedar Hill volume is released from Earthling in 2007.

But of all the characters I've written about, the two I feel closest to are the narrator of "Some Touch of Pity" (because he's basically me), and that of Joseph Alan Conner, the protagonist from "Drowning With Others." I've written stories wherein I've left characters in awful circumstances, and though I've felt bad about it, it was only in Joseph's case that I actually felt guilty; this poor guy did nothing to deserve what happened to him at the end of "Drowning", and that bothered the hell our of my for years.

Luckily, while writing In Silent Graves, I suddenly realized that I had an opportunity to bring him into the story and give him a much happier fate. So that's what I did.

HW: Are there any subjects that you won't tackle in your work?

GB: I won't do erotic horror simply because I'm so bad at it. I published a couple of things in that field several years ago and when I look at them now, I cringe. I lack the deft touch necessary to make something both erotic and horrific.

I also tend to avoid traditional tropes - vampires, zombies, ghosts - because I feel that these subjects grow repetitious and characterless in a hurry. I have written only 2 vampire stories and only two zombie stories, and that was only because I felt I could give them a different spin. I don't see myself doing any more stories like that.

As far as ghosts go, Rick Hautala and T.M Wright pretty much own that area, as far as I'm concerned - though Kealan Patrick-Burke has recently emerged a serious contender to complete that particular triumvirate.

HW: What inspires you the most as a writer?

GB: Exploring the hidden but unbreakable connections between violence and grief and how we as individuals struggle to reconcile these things with the concept of a Just universe in which our daily actions have a purpose. Everything I write is thematically linked to that sole conundrum. I don't know if you can call that what "inspires" me - the idea of inspiration is usually associated with cheerier things, and the word "cheery" and my name have never come up in the same sentence (I'll never be accused of being the life of the party) - but the question has all but obsessed me for most of my life.

There's a great line from William Goldman's novel Control where one character asks another, "What gives meaning to life?" And the other character replies: "People you love, and sadness." That's a brilliant line, almost crystalline in its wisdom and brevity, because if you think about it, everything that we as human beings come to treasure in our daily lives is somehow connected to one of those two things: people we love, and sadness.