A Horror World Retrospective - A Look Back at the People of 2007
By Steven E. Wedel

The best thing about working for Horror World is all the fascinating people I get to visit with for interviews. This year was certainly a banner year in that regard, as I got to interview professors, publishers, pretty gals and … well, let’s just let the alliteration die right there.

I thought that, as we close out the year, we could just look back at some of the most interesting, colorful, or just plain fun quotes from this year’s interview subjects. I mean, if we can be subjected to “The Year’s Funniest TV Commercials”, why not a best-of interview column, right?

Al Sarrantonio recalled his first publication with a mixture of nostalgia and experience gained. He said, “My first professional piece was accepted when I was 16 – by the legendary publishing pirate and non-payer Ray Palmer. It was a nonfiction piece about UFOs that appeared in his Flying Saucers magazine. I didn’t even get an acceptance letter – but I did get a cover credit! Palmer was the guy who started Fate magazine, and edited Amazing Stories for a time. I first knew about the “sale” when my subscription copy arrived. I was high for a week. Boy, was I a dope, and have learned a thing or two since about the biz.”

Horror’s mafia godfather, Thomas F. Monteleone, talked about why got him into writing horror, as opposed to something other genre. “[A] little crumbling paperback or two did the deed (along with a steady diet of the very weird EC comics and their knock-off competitors like Unseen and Witches’ Tales). One was a Wollheim anthology called Macabre, filled with incredible horror stories, and another one, Zacherly’s Midnight Snacks. The fiction captivated because it not only made me think, it scared me. And as we all know, some people like to be scared, and I was always in that bag. I liked the inherent challenge of writing a good horror story, and even back then, I knew this and wanted to see how good I could be. My interest never flagged because we never lose our ability to be disturbed, to be shocked, or forced to peer into the mirror of our own mortality.”

Ah, the possibilities. As she was awaiting the publication of her first novel, here’s what Mary SanGiovanni had to say about why she writes horror: “My mom wouldn't let me be a stripper and I'm no good at sports. I figured a writing career was easier than being a rock star. Less groupies, but less of a taxing lifestyle. Heh.

But seriously, I've always loved to read, and always loved a good story. I find something satisfying about world-building and creating characters. It's everything I loved about play as a child, and it's wrapped up in a neat package between covers of a book or magazine.

I think I'm drawn to horror because when I was little, I was afraid of everything. I still am. Horror helps me work through things. It renews my faith in people, because horror stories, to me, are stories of hope -- stories of strength of the human spirit. In horror, people rise above themselves and become something more than they were before. Good or bad, it's interesting to me to watch the change.”

Mary was lucky, it seems. Long-time pro Chelsea Quinn Yarbro said it’s not easy to get published these days. She did offer some tips, though. “ It’s much harder to get started now, and it wasn’t easy back in the mid-60s. I’d recommend voracious reading, and learning as much about the business as possible, including professional expectations on both sides of the writer/publisher equation. Then I’d make sure I kept writing. I wrote stories for almost three years before I started submitting them, and I submitted over fifty stories before I sold my first one, thirty-two months after my first rejection. The early ones were pretty awful, but you have to do the awful ones to get to the good ones.

Right now is a difficult time in publishing for everyone, with more take-overs and mergers resulting in ever-fewer and more narrowly defined marketplaces, which seems to me as if the major houses are shooting themselves in the foot. What it means is many fewer places for writers – all writers – to sell their work commercially. In addition, driven by demands from the chains, publishers are putting length-caps on what they buy, and no longer want books much more than 100,000 words in length. Shelf-life, like shelf-space, is shrinking. Advances are down, and so are print-runs. Everyone is feeling the pinch. This could prove an opportunity for mid-sized presses to expand their selling-base, and many of them are doing that, but it’s a long -term gamble, and one that will take some years to develop, which makes for a hard time for mid-list writers especially. Electronic publishing is also becoming an important factor, especially for reprints, and in the next five years may take some of the current slack off the market. I don’t want to be gloomy or discouraging, but being aware of the current state of the marketplace can help in making realistic strategies for getting into the market and staying there.”

Don D’Auria, editor of Leisure Books’ horror line, talked about how the genre is healthy again, and what he’s doing to keep it fresh. He said, “ I make it a point to publish at least one new author every year. In ’08 I’ll publish a couple of them. It’s very important to keep bringing fresh talent and new authors into the genre if we want it to stay alive and growing. As much as I love the established authors, we can’t rely on them exclusively. The drawback, of course, is that the first-time author doesn’t have any name recognition yet, which makes it harder to get their books into stores. But the benefit is being able to discover a new talent, someone who we hope we’ll be able to build into an established author in time.”

Don said that, after zombies, he thinks werewolves might be the next big thing in the horror genre. Shortly thereafter, Leisure Books released Shapeshifter from J.F. Gonzalez. Jesus talked about what makes werewolves popular: “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.

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.”

Not that zombies are dead yet. Well, you know … dead again. Just ask Dr. Kim Paffenroth, zombie scholar, author and anthologist. He had some words of wisdom when it comes to writing about horror archetypes, saying, “ I think the first thing is to read outside the genre. If you’re trying to distinguish yourself as an author, you need to learn from great authors, and most of those write outside the horror genre. It’s where you’ll see good models for all the techniques of the craft of writing, and also where you’ll get ideas that are universal and not confined to one genre – how to treat themes of memory or grief or betrayal, for example, which are crucial to many horror stories, but which are themes found throughout world literature. And as you turn to apply these ideas to the given trope, try to focus on why you’re writing that particular kind of story – what does a zombie or vampire tale offer you that’s particular to that subgenre? And love your characters: they’re not just targets or victims or monsters. I can think of many characters who are as real and alive to me as most flesh and blood people. One of the most endearing comments I read about Romero was how he rewrote the ending of Dawn so that Fran and Peter would live, just because he liked them too much to kill them off, even though that’s how it originally ended. And his sense turned out to be narratively correct, too: again, that irony of uplifting nihilism is so powerful and beautiful at the end of that film and gives it its unique appeal.”

Speaking of rising from the dead, in a sense, Brian Hodge explained where he’d been during a long hiatus. “ At the root of it all is that after WILD HORSES, my next crime novel, MAD DOGS, didn’t get picked up in New York. It took the better part of two years to write, and by the time it was done and my agent sent it to Morrow, they’d been taken over, and everybody had been fired, with an entire new crew brought in that I had no history with. Morrow had also made an investment in Tim Dorsey as their whacked-out crime guy, and there wasn’t any interest in continuing with me. I just wasn’t established in hardcover yet, because I’d only had the one. The half-dozen paperbacks didn’t really count.

After that, we couldn’t find another taker. The novel was too long, or too complex, or too weird, or had too many characters, or should’ve had a woman as the central character, like WILD HORSES did, or would’ve been too hard to market because of its mood swings.

So I went from a six-figure book to nothing. I had to come up with another source of income, so I started doing ongoing work for a magazine publisher on various computer and consumer electronics titles. That took a lot of self-education along with the work itself.

So, a lot of factors played into this hiatus, and some were beyond my control, but I’m ultimately responsible for how I react to something, and I reacted to this situation poorly, let it become very debilitating. But then, nothing’s ever wasted, or shouldn’t be, so from this vantage point the best thing I can do is draw all the lessons out of the experience that I can, to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Life experience. That’ll change your writing style, too. Just ask Chris Fulbright, who recalled the purpose of some of his early writing: “I’ve been scribbling tales for as long as I’ve been able to put pen to paper. We moved around a lot when I was a kid. My dad was a project manager for a construction company, so as soon as a project was done, we’d up and move. I didn’t make many friends. Most of the time, we lived in a trailer on the job sites, so it wasn’t like I had a neighborhood to go ride a bike in and get in fights with other kids and kiss girls and stuff. Instead of going outside to play, I’d create my own worlds on paper -- it started out as just another way to play, I guess, and it’s still kind of like that. In retrospect, knowing what I know now, being all “growed-up” it was, and continues to be, the greatest escape from real life.

I started getting serious about it in high school back in the mid-‘80s. I wrote a bunch of super gory, extra violent horror stories with the sole intent of grossing people out. It was a lot of fun. I did that for a while, until one day, I wrote this sorta thoughtful ghost story with nary a drop of blood. My creative writing teacher freaked out and gushed about it, and published it in the high school literary magazine.”

Thomas Tessier’s first publications came before flower power fizzled (that’d be the early 1970s). Among other things, Thomas talked about his writing style, which is light on gore. He said, “I think it ’s partly in the nature of such experiences for most people, the gray area, the edge of uncertainty. Was that a ghost? Did I actually see it, or merely imagine it, or was it a trick of the light, something else? I try to write convincingly, as if these things are indeed real and are happening. Sometimes the result is fairly explicit, other times it ’s more shaded in uncertainty. In general, spelling things out too much is self-defeating, it just dismantles everything you ’re trying to put together.”

Exactly! I mean, if I spelled out for you that the purpose of a “Best of 2007” column really comes down to the fact I forgot to interview anybody for January 2008, the column loses some appeal, right?

Oh. Wait. Did I write that out loud?