A Horror World Conversation with Thomas F. Monteleone
By Steven E. Wedel

I first met Thomas F. Monteleone at the ill-fated Horrorfind Weekend held in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2004. But, of course, I knew of him way before that. He’s been a published novelist since 1975, two years after his first short story saw print. He’s also very respected for the Borderlands anthologies he edits and publishes, and for dispensing advice to newbies he encounters online.

If there is a godfather to the horror genre today, it could very well be Tom Monteleone.

Horror World: I read that you knew at an early age that you wanted to be a writer when you grew up. What prompted that decision?

Thomas F. Monteleone: I remember the day pretty clearly. I was reading a paperback collection of stories by Theodore Sturgeon called Caviar, which had appeared in 1955, but I was reading a few years later. I was around 12 and the stories just blew me away. I’d never read anything so well crafted and weirdly riveting because they were so imaginative. And then, right in the middle of the experience, I had this kind of zen moment where it struck me that an actual person had thought up these stories and wrote them down. What a concept. Only a very cool person could do this, I figured, and being even then a rampant egotist, I wanted to be like this guy with the fish-name.

I went on to try to write a novel for the old hardcover SF and Fantasy series of YA books published by Winston. I wrote 48 pages before losing steam. It was amazingly prescient—the 14-year-old hero was the son of an Egyptologist who gets to sneak around in old tombs, and he finds the wreckage of a flying saucer under the Great Pyramid—no shit.

HW: Why horror? What attracted you to dark fiction, and what has kept you interested in the genre?

TFM: Well, again, 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.

HW: How long were you writing before you began selling your work? What did you do for a living until your career took off?

TFM: Hmmm, well I really started writing (fairly inept) stories around 13 or 14, and did it throughout high school—racking up rejections from our high school literary magazine. (too “fanciful,” said the English instructor editor). I took a break in college, majoring in Budweiser with a minor in girls dumb enough to buy into my line of crap. As I forced my way through a master’s degree, I started writing fiction again, so I was maybe 23. I sent out stories for three years, gathered up literally hundreds of rejection slips . . . . before selling my first story for a penny a word. My check was for $30 from Sol Cohen, publisher of Amazing Stories. While my first love and preference was horror, I was forced to send most of my stories to SF/Fantasy magazines and anthologies because there simply were damned few venues or markets for horror or even “dark fantasy.” By then I had consumed all of Poe, discovered people like Bierce, Lovecraft, Blackwood, Saki, Lafcadio Hearne, and “pulp” writers Brennan and a guy named Bradbury. And these were the guys I dug the most. But couldn’t find many places who would pay you to write like them.

HW: Tell us about your writing process. What is the evolution of a Thomas F. Monteleone story, from idea to published work?

TFM: Some people start with a title or a character. For me it was always an idea—a concept or a premise that demanded a story grow out of its essential weirdness. In addition, I usually want my story to have a kernel of utter and undeniable originality, or I won’t bother writing it. That’s what I usually beg off on invites to anthologies about ghosts or zombies or vampires—too familiar for me. I need to examine new places that lurk . . . oh, I don’t know . . . . out on the Borderlands?

So anyway, I have the idea that won’t go away, won’t leave me alone, and I slowly get my POV, my voice, and my character(s) in place to help me explore the concept or question I’ve posed. Writing the first draft of a 5 to 6 k story can take me weeks because I don’t outline or plan anything at the short fiction lengths, so I have to let the story grow organically and I end up telling it to myself—a process I know sounds like bullshit, but is really how it feels to me as it’s happening. I can’t explain it any other way. But I do know this—when I’m doing a story that does NOT feel like that, it’s usually a turkey, a false start, and my instincts tell me it’s not gonna work, and I move on to the next idea. Lots of half-baked, stillborns in the file cabinet, which is fine with me.

When I get a first draft done, I usually let it hang out in the smokehouse for a week or so to cure. I need to see it with fresh and harsh editorial eyes. Most of the time, I see all the bad constructions, clumsy phrases, lazy images, etc. and I smote them in the ass with my red pen. Then I go through, revising the digital file and that is pretty much it.

I’m not one of those mooks who tortures every sentence until it’s as limp as a piece of overcooked linguini (or worse). Those guys who say they’re satisfied if they write one good sentence each day? Fuck them. They’re poseurs, not writers. I run from them like extras in a Godzilla movie.

HW: Is the process different for a novel compared to a short story? Do you have a preference for one form or the other?

TFM: Similar in that the concept or idea comes first, then the novel’s cast of characters, and finally a title. I am usually TERRIBLE at novel titles and usually leave that up to my wife or editor or one of my trusted writer-friends. I do attempt to create a rough map of the novel’s basic structure and get a firm grasp of the novel “type” I’m doing (quest, mystery, paranoid, historical, etc.) I can’t really call it an outline because I end with a lot of stuff in shadow, but I usually know where I want things to end up, and then leave myself the daily challenge of seeing what I come up with to actually get me there.

HW: What prompted you to become an editor as well as a writer?

TFM: This sounds inane, but I figured that’s what all writers should do. The best of us learn how to edit ourselves, and I assumed early on you could get to be a very good editor (of your own work) if you trained by doing the less painful (for you) task of dismantling other people’s attempts at fiction. I really believe this is true.

HW: Why did you begin Borderlands Press? What were your goals when you began it?

TFM: I kind of stumbled into it. When I came up with the idea of doing an original anthology series that would define new directions and find new writers, I spent a week walking around NYC pitching to the legion of editors who all told me anthologies don’t do well in the marketplace—especially ones that don’t have any particular “theme” or shtick to trumpet. So I called my long-time friend, John Maclay, who lived in Baltimore, and who ran a really wonderful small press, Maclay and Associates.

I pitched him the idea and he wanted to do a limited edition. Now dig, this was like 1989, and while I had been very much aware of the upsurge in interest in collectable books because of the success of King and Charlie Grant and Karl Wagner’s Carcosa, I hadn’t imagined my anthology would fall into that heady realm. John M. did, and he urged me to start looking for stories.

The result was the initial volume of Borderlands, which Maclay published in a beautiful binding. It went on to rack up lots of award nominations (losing the World Fantasy Award to an anthology with the wildly original theme of haunted houses . . . .) and had the Stoker winners for Short Story and Novelette within its pages. The girl I was dating at the time (who later became my wife, Elizabeth) suggested that I should keep doing additional volumes and hey, why not publish them yourself?

Why not? I had sit-down with John Maclay and he sent me off with his blessing and all the valuable info he could dump on me how to go through the agony of getting books typeset, designed, printed, bound, shipped, and . . . . oh yeah, sold.

John is a stand-up guy, a real pillar of the horror community, and it PISSES ME OFF each year I see some horror group like HWA or IHG or WFC or whoever give out their crappy little “best publisher” awards to presses who haven’t been around long enough to carry John Maclay’s lunchbox. He was one of the pioneering small presses who kept the genre fresh and vital and received little or no recognition for it. He deserves a special award and I would like to bludgeon some of the responsible award committees into making it happen.

But I digress. What was the question? Oh, yeah, goals . . . . Well, the first goal was to make some money and keep the whole machine clanking along. I had a keen enough editorial eye (helped by my pal, Charlie Grant) but my level of business acumen couldn’t sell lemonade on the street corner. Things changed when Elizabeth took over the actual running of the press, and other than a 5-year hiatus when we moved to New Hampshire and spent most of our time giving our daughter a great childhood, we’ve kept things pointing upwards (something I always thought was a good thing).

HW: You’ve toiled in this genre for over three decades. What keeps people coming back to tales of the macabre?

TFM: Doug Winter laid that famous concept on us that “horror is an emotion,” and I think he nails the central truth underpinning the reason why people keep returning to the scary tale. It deals with what we fear—whatever that is—and it carries the promise of solving the unsolvable question of what the hell this death-thing is really all about.

HW: You’ve seen interest in horror wax and wane, seen the genre’s boom and seen it declared dead. What do you think of the state of dark fiction today?

TFM: It seems to be holding its own. It’s certainly not as bad off as sky-fie seems to be. Science fiction publishing took a big torpedo amidships late ’80s and early ’90s when a new generation of potential readers (mutants all) got addicted to video games instead of paperback anthologies and comics. I mean, it’s a lot “cooler” to actually pilot your own starfighter than just read about doing it, right? Better to be vaporizing aliens in dark corridors of doom-inspired games than imagining it in some dumb book . . . .?

Apparently so.

And that hasn’t really happened to HDF. I think the drop-in readership in the nineties was a reflection of the tsunami of bad horror novels and blatant King imitators who couldn’t write very well and had no idea what makes a great visceral horror story live.

The genre seems healthy enough to sustain a small press willing to try new writers and as long as we have a flagship magazine like Rich Chizmar’s Cemetery Dance, and a few original anthology series running, I think we can weather any storms and let the process of winnowing and evolution do their jobs. The bad shit gets flushed out of the system sooner or later, and then we have the distilled essence of why the genre has been a literary staple for as long as fiction has existed.

HW: Why do some small presses fail and some succeed? If someone wanted to start a new press, other than seeing a psychiatrist, what should he do?

TFM: Now that’s a good question. I can remember one of the first “big” small presses—Dark Harvest—which started out with such promise and a seemingly unending stream of great books. Other than the high-end specialties of Whispers, Scream, and Donald Grant, DH was showing everyone else what a small press should be—affordable limited, signed editions of work by writers we all wanted to read.

But something happened to the guys who ran DH (and I’m not going to name them because for the people who remember, it’s not necessary), and I’m not sure what it was, but whatever the microbe, it has infected other small press publishers over the years. Despite the perception that small presses make Scrooge McDuck look like a piker, the reality is that the money is just okay even when things are good. But some small press autocrats allowed themselves to be twisted into believing there was gold in the hills if you could just figure outs ways to cut corners and be “innovative” when it comes to paying everyone.

This is the first reason small presses implode—they keep swapping down quality until its clientele realizes the shell game and blows them off. People support small press because of quality—both in the written material and the stuff of which the books are made.

Another source of failure: the small press publisher who strays into the other extreme by trying to create such spectacular specialty item they cannot possibly create enough of a return to keep the ledger in the black. This can be choosing cloths and papers and artists beyond sensible budgets, or paying advances of royalty schedules which are unrealistic and economically crippling. Or maybe a dunderheaded assessment of potential audience, or a failure to realize that the small press is a volume game—the more titles you have in print, the more likely somebody will be ordering something on any given day and therefore keeping the cashflow going.

You have to have some money to start and maintain a small press, as well as writers people not only want to read, but also want to collect.

If you’re publishing the next serial killer novel by Mickey Shivitz, you might not be around very long. So . . . . if you have delusions of starting a small press, get a big enough loan that won’t kill you, establish a schedule of writers and titles that will drag you through the first few years of establishing a name buyers can trust, and be conservative in your expectations. If you’re not an editor of professional mien, then you might get yourself in trouble by not buying professional material. People will not buy an endless supply of crap. Once a philosopher, twice and beyond . . . a fool.

HW: Now, another little project you do is the Borderlands Press Writers Boot Camp. People who have survived this camp swear it has made them better writers and often boosted their careers. First, tell us why you’d offer a boot camp.

TFM: I’m not going to strike the altruistic pose here. I believe I (and my cadre of professional writing peers) have a marketable product—a wealth of experience and the ability to teach it—and if people are willing to pay me for my knowledge, I’m going to take their money. I am a professional—that means I take money for what I do. I have a daughter to get through Catholic high school and college, so I am, as they say, motivated.

Okay, now here’s the more noble answer: E and I have read literally thousands of submissions to the Borderlands anthology series. A disturbingly high number of them are not close to being of professional quality, and it’s clear to me many of newer writers have somehow bypassed things like grammar, syntax, story-logic, and basic elements of storytelling. By offering a very tough, very demanding, and hypercritical environment (our Boot Camp weekend) we show aspirants what they will need to master to become professional writers.

I’m not going to bullshit you here—E and all the instructors were shocked by how much info we were able to shoehorn into each Camp, and how obvious the level of improvement evidenced when we showcased the grunts latest efforts (created over the weekend). The improvement is greatest, I think, in the simple awareness of what good writing is, all the elements which make it so, and how to self-edit one’s work with a cold, critical eye.

HW: Can you give us an idea of what goes on in the boot camp? How does it make writers better?

TFM: To keep this from becoming a section from my Complete Idiot’s Guide, I’m going to refer readers to the Borderlands Press website where there are several really good summaries of what we do at a Boot Camp. I think Matt Warner also has a good one on his website.

But briefly, we have each grunt send a piece—either short story or novel-plus-synopsis—which gets line-edited by each of our four instructors. Each instructor targets a particular element—plot, character, dialogue, grammar/syntax—plus a few ancillary ones. We do some eye-opening exercises on Friday, plus an assignment; then a LONG 8-hour session of round-table critiques on each of the four major areas, then a long evening of exercises, readings, and Q&A. On Sunday, we examine and critique the assignments and do a cool-down Q&A.

I think our camp makes writers better because we give them the tools of self-criticism and self-editing that lets them read their work in a new, hopefully lasting, manner.

HW: Who should consider the boot camp? When does a writer know he’s ready for that step?

TFM: There’s no easy answer to that. Some writers do it early on in their careers, and I’ve heard veteran writers say they wish they’d done something like that, claiming it would have shaved years off the time it took them to develop.

Other writers only come to Camp after many years of rejection and desperation. Some of them have not the talent or the resilience to make it, but they come to find out definitively.

And surprisingly, we’ve had more seasoned professionals than you would imagine attend a Camp because they are experimenting or trying something new they want to spring on a captive critical audience, or they sense they’ve fallen into a comfortable rut and need a shake-up or a tune-up. Or maybe they have that one novel that just won’t snap into shape and they need to see what’s going on from a new perspective.

HW: You really impressed me with your reading of your story about the jazz musician with the magic horn at Horrorfind a couple of years ago. Do you have dramatic training? Do you practice your readings?

TFM: You’re referring to a story I recorded for Borderlands Press’s Dark Voices series entitled “Horn of Plenty.” Yeah, I love doing that one because it brings out the ham in me. At a reading, I believe a writer should do more than simply read his story to us. He needs to perform it and breathe a new life and dimension to the tale or he shouldn’t bother. I HATE to go to a reading where the writer reads like funeral director going down his price list, or worse, stumbles through the piece as if he’s never seen it before. Man, that just embarrassing. Just as some people should never be seen naked, some people should never read in public.

As for the dramatic training, I went to a Jesuit high school, which required everyone take a class called Elocution, and that everyone should participate in at least one school play (they also required you try out for at least one sport).

Also, early on in my writing career, when Harlan Ellison and I were fast friends, I was hanging out at his place one weekend and he forced me to learn how to read my stories in public. He was a master at it, and I’d like to think the student outdistanced the teacher.

HW: There’s a pretty important aspect of your life we’ve barely touched on so far. Tell us how you met your wife.

TFM: I met Elizabeth in 1989 at a Chinese restaurant called Ding How in the funky Fells Point area of Baltimore. She claims she found me arrogant and abrasive and unattractive at the time, but we soon started going out and have been together ever since. She has endlessly fascinated me because she is smart, sexy, well-read, and has a genuine sense of humor. To say nothing of her business instincts and ability to keep me focused and organized. She is my wife and best friend and even though I often do dumb things to botch things up, she has stayed with me and I’ll love her forever.

HW: It’s often difficult for creative people to find a spouse who understands them. With Elizabeth, you’ve actually found a creative partner. How does that partnership work? Is she your first reader? How do you share duties in the Borderlands Press publishing and boot camp?

 

TFM: She is a great editor and I always trust her savvy assessments of what I write. She sees it first and has no qualms about telling me when I’ve launched a dog-rocket. We share many interests and have never lost the magic of exploring books and plays and films together. In the day-to-day workings of the press, I am basically her conduit to all the writers she wants to publish. As far as design, typesetting, scheduling, budgets, and sales, she does everything. I’ll help when she wants it, but she basically knows what she wants and goes about making it happen. Boot Camp is her baby from advertising to organizing. I am just one of the instructors in that operation and I like it that way. Reading all the stories and critiquing them is plenty enough for me.

HW: What’s your opinion of the online “horror community?” Should new writers get involved on message boards and such, or just focus on writing?

TFM: It’s the best thing ever to happen and the worst. A great way to stay on top of everything going on in the genre, but it can be an addictive tarpit pulling you down to a place where writing for pay gets sublimated to clever posts and endless blogs. Mike Laimo tells me a good MySpace presence can build your career and I believe him—I just can’t find the time to devote to it.

Online can be very seductive for new writers because of the instant access to SO much info. When I was breaking in there was nothing like it, and looking back, it feels like we were communicating with smoke signals and Morse code. I think new writers need to use the online community as just another tool. The danger lies in letting it dictate everything you do.

HW: What is the most valuable piece of advice you could give a new writer?

TFM: Believe in what you are doing. The old saw is true—the only person who will stop you from becoming a writer is you. Just write your ass off. You’ll get better and someone will pay you for the effort

HW: What do you have coming out soon that we should be looking for?

TFM: I have a YA under a pseudonym—you can try to spot it next year and take a guess or two. I have a horror novel, Serpentine, coming out next month, and a big thriller under a pseudonym next year. I did a script for Masters of Horror which may or may not make it to the screen. Short stories in a lot of anthologies, including Legends from the Mountain State, Midnight Premiere, The Brimstone Turnpike, and a Tribute to Richard Matheson. I guess I’ll keep writing the MAFIA columns as long as I have opinions and experiences to share. Paul Wilson and I are creating a series of comics and graphic novels, and I am also developing original programming with him for the Horror Channel (which will be a reality, I promise you).

HW: What should I have asked but didn’t? What’s your final word?

TFM: You want me to ask a question for you? Well, let’s see, let’s try Ego Gratification for a thousand, Alex . . . . .For everyone reading this, I want you send me an email at tfm1946@comcast.net and tell me your fave short story by me, and your fave novel by not-so-humble self. You can also cite your fave MAFIA column.

Speaking of which . . . . I really like it when I get these emails from people who read my columns for the first time and don’t get my sense of humor. I love it when they think I’m that seriously conceited and pleased with myself. Some of them react so strongly you know it’s their own rampant insecurities spilling over the brim of their indignation.

They can’t stand the thought of anyone actually liking himself . . . . when they themselves are such miserable, self-flagellating amoeboids.

See, who said I wasn’t sensitive?

 

.