A Horror World Conversation with J.F. Gonzalez
By Steven E. Wedel

I first heard Jesus preach at Horrorfind in 2006. It was at that moment that I accepted him as my personal sav—

OK, I’m sure J.F. Gonzalez gets enough of those jokes. I did first meet him at Horrorfind last year. He was reading from CLICKERS II. How good was it? Even my wife, who doesn’t usually read, wanted to read that book immediately after hearing the excerpt.

Some time after that I got to read and review THE BELOVED and realized that J.F. Gonzalez was the real deal – a fine author able to deliver more than one type of story. Where the two CLICKERS books are great campy fun, THE BELOVED was deeper and darker.

Those are just a few of the works this southern California native has turned out. Leisure Books is set to release a new edition of one of his earlier books, so we thought it would be a good time to sit down and talk with Jesus about his writing.

Horror World: Let’s start off with SHAPESHIFTER. Give us a brief synopsis of the story.

J.F. Gonzalez: Shapeshifter is about a young guy named Mark Wiseman who is blackmailed into committing murder by a high-ranking corporate executive named Bernard Roberts. The trick is, Mark’s a werewolf and Bernard knows this. Bernard wants Mark to use his curse for his own means, namely to eliminate certain people who may be in a position to expose him for some white-collar crimes he’s been involved in. So, in essence, Bernard uses Mark’s curse against him. That’s the basic logline of the story, but there’s more to it than that. There’s some corporate espionage stuff, a really cool horror story involving a werewolf, and a bit of a love story as well.

HW: Who originally published it, and how did that go?

JFG: Shapeshifter was originally published as an ebook in 2000 by an outfit called XC Publishing, which has since gone defunct. It did okay as an ebook, certainly much better than my previous novel, Conversion, which was a vampire novel, also published as an ebook earlier that year. Wildside Press reprinted Shapeshifter a few years later in trade paperback where it did even better. In fact, it came out around the same time a few other werewolf novels were released in the small press, namely Harry Shannon’s Night of the Werewolf, Bill Gagliani’s Wolf’s Trap, and Shara by some guy named Steve Wedel.

HW: How did you go about pitching the reprint to Leisure?

JFG: I gave a copy of the Wildside Press edition to my editor, Don D’Auria, at the World Horror Convention in San Francisco last year. We were meeting for coffee, discussing what my next book should be. I’d already sent him an original called The Corporation, which he liked, but he wanted to go with something a little more traditional to build my name in the Leisure stable. I knew immediately what he was getting at; The Corporation is a pretty weird book. I like it a lot, as do the few people (namely my agent and pre-readers) who have read it, but it’s a pretty radical departure from my previous work. It’s definitely not a traditional horror novel, but it certainly classifies as a horror novel in a broad sense in that it’s got a lot of weirdness in it and it does play with certain archetypes familiar to the genre. Anyway, when we returned to the convention I found a dealer who was carrying Shapeshifter and got a copy for Don. He took it up to his room that afternoon and that night at a party he told me he’d started it and couldn’t put it down and we had a deal. That was the quickest sale I’ve ever made.

HW: What makes your shapeshifters different from those in other stories? How did you go about creating your rules for the creatures?

JFG: When I first started Shapeshifter I knew I wanted to do something different with the werewolf mythos. The first novel I ever wrote was a vampire novel. That novel, Conversion, was fun to write, but I felt I was treading old ground. Back then, everybody was doing vampire novels, and as much as I tried to make Conversion different, the fact that I was writing a vampire novel didn’t make it seem much different from all the others. So when I got the idea for Shapeshifter, I knew I was in a unique position because nobody was doing werewolf novels that much. This gave me an opportunity to mix things up, breathe some new life into the mythos. I kept a few elements of the classic werewolf myths intact, but deviated completely from others. That made it easier to avoid the so-called rules of the sub-genre. Mark Wiseman really has no idea how he became a werewolf. It’s hinted at in the story, but because of his own misgivings and inability to discern how it happened, he’s able to prove many werewolf theories false. In his case, he’s able to control his curse. He can control his instinct to change, yet he also has to change every month, otherwise if he goes too long without it, the curse will just take over and he’ll be unable to control himself. That’s something I’ve never really seen before in werewolf novels, and I thought it added a nice touch.

HW: Don D’Auria said here a while back that he thought werewolves would be the new zombies. He’d already published Bill Gagliani’s WOLF’S TRAP and Leisure has a few other werewolf novels lined up. What do you think of that assessment? Will werewolves be the next big thing?

JFG: I hope so. With a few notable exceptions, vampires have become really boring.

HW: Why do people like werewolves?

JFG: Maybe because they represent the more bestial side of horror fiction. Before Interview With a Vampire, vampires were actually scary. Thanks to the flood of Anne Rice imitators, vampires have been completely neutered. There’s nothing threatening about them. Occasionally somebody does something different and original with them. I’m just now reading The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova and liking it. And F. Paul Wilson’s novel Midnight Mass was a welcome return to the nasty, blood-thirsty vampire story I grew up reading. I really want to see 30 Days of Night – the graphic novel never registered on my radar because I’m usually five years behind the times when it comes to graphic novels and comics. But most of the other stuff? It bores me.

Werewolves also represent the dark, primal, and animalistic side of human nature much more than the vampire. Vampires are seen as a purely supernatural creature; they’re immortal, they can change into bats or rats (or even wolves!) and there’s a definite undead, supernatural element to them. There’s also a clinical, cold nature about them. Werewolves, on the other hand, are more human in nature than vampires. It’s almost like having a split personality, only you completely change physically, and for the most part you remember what you did when you were a werewolf. So it’s kind of got that Jekyll and Hyde thing going, which represents our dark side.

HW: Leisure gave you a really nice cover for the book. Did you get to have any input in what it would look like?

JFG: No, I didn’t, but I’m not complaining. Leisure did an excellent job on that cover. I’m very happy with it.

HW: Let’s talk about the two CLICKERS stories. Both have been collaborations with different authors. How did those come about?

JFG: The first one was with Mark Williams, who was a Special FX artist in the film industry in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. He also wrote screenplays and was involved in comics. We met, became friends, and wrote a screenplay together (Butcher’s Dozen) that his agent shopped around town for awhile. It actually took a couple years to option it, but as any working screenwriter in LA knows…many screenplays are optioned, few get made. Very true.

We collaborated so well together that I suggested we try a novel. He already had the basic outline for Clickers, he showed it to me, I liked it, and we wrote it together over the course of about a year, maybe a year and a half. Selling it was a different story, and much more difficult due to the changing times in publishing (nobody was buying horror novels anymore), which was why it took four years from initial completion as a book to first-time publication.

With the second book it was simply a matter of finally wanting to do a sequel to Clickers and realizing that if I wanted to do the book (and Mark’s memory) justice, I needed to collaborate with another writer. I think had Mark lived (he passed away in May of 1998 from post-cancer respiratory problems), we would have collaborated on a sequel. So there was no way I could do a sequel alone. It didn’t feel right. Brian Keene was really the perfect choice for the book. His outlook and approach to horror fiction was not only similar to mine, they were similar to Mark’s, and that made it a slam dunk choice. I approached him with the idea, figuring he’d turn me down because at this point he was so busy and had basically exploded in the field, but that didn’t happen, thank Cthulhu.

HW: What was it like to collaborate with different authors on book one and book two? If there’s a third book, will you look for a third collaborator?

JFG: There really wasn’t much difference between collaborating with two different writers. I think the only difference was the approach. When Mark and I wrote Clickers, we outlined heavily. Brian and I went on a very general idea and story sketch and that was it. Chalk that up to both of us having the experience by then to not need any stinking outlines!

As for a third book, it looks like there’s going to be one, and in the Clickers tradition there will be a third author involved. The secret’s already been spilled on some message boards, so I might as well reveal the name of my collaborator now: Jeff Strand. Jeff and I have been in talks and story conferences back and forth for a year now, and Shane at Delirium has already voiced his desire to publish it. It’s just a matter of synching our schedules together to sit down and write a proposal, solidify the deal, and then write the damn thing.

HW: I mentioned THE BELOVED up at the top. That was a pretty bleak story. I was surprised at who died in that one. Tell us what inspired you to write that story.

JFG: Various things. Knowing people, friends and family alike, who have been in destructive relationships where you wonder why they’re involved because their boyfriend/girlfriend is always using them in some fashion, whether for money, power, sex, whatever. Guys usually refer to their friend’s girlfriends who fit these characteristics as ‘gold diggers’, but I’ve known women who’ve had boyfriends who’ve exhibited the same trait, so it isn’t limited by sex. I jokingly opined aloud at a party during a discussion of this phenomenon that maybe these so-called gold diggers aren’t really human, but succubi. And the moment I said that the entire plot of The Beloved came to me. I jotted down some notes and proceeded to write it, and that was pretty much it.

HW: Changing gears a little, let’s talk about you. How long have you been writing, and why do you do it?

JFG: Like a lot of writers, I started when I was a teenager, but I wasn’t that serious with it. I knew in the back of my mind that I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t know how to go about and do it. So I fantasized about being a writer through most of the eighties while working a series of dead-end, stupid jobs and occasionally wrote stories in my spare time. I was very much into the horror small press and just soaked everything up like a sponge. I eventually got to the point where I’d built up better confidence in myself as a person and a writer, and decided to quit procrastinating and just do it. As to why I do it, I can’t not do it. Again, ask any working writer and they’ll tell you they can’t quit. Once it’s in the blood, it’s there for life.

HW: What is your writing process? Do you do it every day? For how long?

JFG: If I’m working on a novel, as I am now, I write on a pretty regular schedule, usually about two-three hours a day, four to five days a week. I’ve gotten really good at my time management, which is needed in my life due to the fact that I still have a day job and I have a family and interests outside of the industry that I like to be involved in. With that kind of schedule, I can usually turn out five pages a day. That’s about a novel a year. Not bad for a part-timer.

HW: Have you ever had writer’s block? If so, how do you overcome it? If not, do you believe it exists?

JFG: I’ve never had it in the traditional sense. I’ve been discouraged, mostly by lack of confidence in myself, and that led to a form of writer’s block where I didn’t want to write anything. But that was years ago and I’ve pretty much gotten over it. Do I believe it exists? If you stop believing in yourself and your abilities, I’m sure that lack of confidence can manifest itself as writer’s block the way it did with me.

HW: You’ve done some editing for Iniquities Publications and Lone Wolf Publications. Is that something you enjoyed? Something you’d like to do more of?

JFG: I enjoyed editing to a certain degree, but I’m not sure if I want to do more of it in the future. I enjoyed working with talented writers, especially new writers. That was always a thrill. I’m not sure if I’d want to do it again, though. Each project had its enjoyable moments and affected me in a positive way, but each had its headaches, too. Probably the major negative aspect is that it sucks up your own writing time. It would take a special project to make me say yes to another editing gig again.

HW: You’ve had a lot of jobs, from file clerk to warehouse worker to computer nerd. How did those influence you?

JFG: Working different day jobs have influenced my work in the sense that I’ve gotten to know people from all walks of life, from blue-collar warehouse grunts to white collar office workers and executives. When you’re writing fiction, your characters have to be believable and real to the reader. For example, in Shapeshifter….I worked with plenty of guys like Mark Wiseman. The corporate culture I lay out in that novel is loosely based on the real corporate environment I worked in at a job a long time ago. If you’re a writer and you get out and interact with different people every day for years, some of that interaction is bound to come out in how you develop characters.

HW: You seem like a pretty quiet guy, and yet some of your writing is quite graphic. Do your family and friends ever wonder about you? What has their reaction been after reading your work?

JFG: Close family and friends have no problem with what I write, and their opinion of me is all that matters. They’re smart enough to differentiate what I portray in a book like Survivor, which is a bleak and brutal piece of fiction, to what I’m like in real life. To paraphrase Robert Bloch, I’ve never conjured up a demon, seen a giant crab monster or a any kind of beastie for that matter, turned into a werewolf or a vampire, been a serial killer, made a snuff movie, consorted with a succubus, or walked with a zombie. There is a segment of the population that digs horror fiction, that loves being disturbed, and my job is to scare, disturb, or unsettle them. It’s like being an actor in a way. Most people, upon seeing Anthony Hopkins on the street, aren’t going to scream in terror “Oh my God, it’s Hannibal Lector” and run for their lives. The few that do behave like that I have no use for, and their personal opinion of me doesn’t matter.

I’m more interested in what makes some people think that just because somebody either reads or writes dark fiction, they’re automatically branded a deviant or a lunatic. People who read or write romance fiction aren’t automatically branded nymphomaniacs. What’s so different about horror fiction that brings about these wrong-headed assumptions? `I find that fascinating.

HW: Like so many other authors today, you’ve worked in the small press for quite a while before hitting mass market status, but you continue to release books through the small press. What are the advantages/disadvantages of small press and mass market?

JFG: Advantages of the small press: they’re willing to take risks most mass market publishers won’t. The disadvantages: for the most part the money isn’t as good, although that is changing in my case. Advantages of working with a mass market publisher like Leisure is the greater exposure you can get through seeing your work at grocery stores or big box chain bookstores. You do reach a much wider readership, and hopefully those people will be impressed enough to look for your small press backlist. Another advantage of a mass market publisher is getting your work into the hands of people in the film industry.

HW: What advice can you share with authors who are still just in the small press and looking to move up?

JFG: I’m a bad one for dispensing advice, because had I followed the advice of others I probably wouldn’t be where I am at this stage in my career today. The only advice I can offer is to write often, read broadly and often, keep up to date with the publishing industry, and stay away from posting on internet message boards because they can drain away time that is better spent for writing.

HW: Tell us what’s on the horizon after SHAPESHIFTER.

JFG: Bloodletting Press is publishing a short novel I wrote with Wrath James White called Hero, which I’m excited about. Alan Clark did the cover illustration, and a guy named Alex McVey is doing the interiors. As soon as I knock the first draft of this novel I’m working on off my desk, I plan to write a film treatment for it to get it in the hands of some producers I know – I think it’ll make a great film. As for books, I have a novel I’m working on now called PRIMITIVE, and I started another one last summer called BACK FROM THE DEAD that I had to set aside to meet some deadlines.

HW: What is your ultimate career goal?

JFG: Making enough money from the writing to be able to afford to quit my day job and live comfortably. That would mean selling more books, eventually to bigger publishers, but for now I’m happy with Leisure. It would also mean getting more involved with screenwriting, which I’m getting back into again after a long absence.

HW: What should I have asked you but didn’t?

JFG: It sounds like supernatural/monster horror is your forte, yet you’ve written three psychological horror/suspense novels – Fetish, Survivor, and Bully. Which form do you enjoy the most?

I actually prefer writing supernatural horror. Real life horrors are much too dreary, depressing, and shocking to address in fiction. With the exception of Bully, those three books were written in a period when supernatural horror wasn’t really selling to mass market publishers and I decided to try to my hand at that kind of story. I enjoy reading psychological horror, and if an idea occurs to me that will lend itself more to that type of story, I’ll do it, but for the most part I enjoy the supernatural.