A Horror World Conversation with Joe McKinney
By Steven E. Wedel

Some people you meet and are just fascinated and want to keep talking with them for hours and hours. But life has other demands. Joe McKinney is one of those people. He has amazing stories to tell. And he’s a man who appreciates a certain Austin, Texas, restaurant that could teacher Hooter’s a thing or two.

Horror World: Joe, thanks for taking the time to talk with us today. You’ve got a new book out and we’re going to discuss that, but first, let’s let folks get to know you. After all, it’s always good to know a cop. Give us a little bio, would ya?

Joe McKinney:  You bet.  Like you said, I’m a homicide detective for the San Antonio Police Department who has been writing professionally since 2006.  I’m the author of Dead City (Kensington Publishing Corp., 2006) and Quarantined (Lachesis Publishing, 2009) and about thirty horror, crime, and science fiction short stories.  I have a Master’s Degree in English Literature from The University of Texas at San Antonio and extensive professional training in disaster mitigation, forensics, and homicide investigation techniques.  Currently I live in Helotes, Texas, a small country town northwest of San Antonio with my wife and two daughters.  I’m an Active Member of both the Horror Writers Association and the International Thriller Writers Association and I’m a frequent guest at regional science fiction and horror conventions.

HW: How long have you been a policeman, and how many of those years have you been working homicide there in San Antonio?

JM:  I’ve been with the San Antonio Police Department for eleven years.  Seven of those years were spent working Patrol and Traffic, plus some really exciting time with the Emergency Operations Command, where I learned a lot about disaster mitigation, which is basically designing municipal strategies for dealing with floods and forest fires and terrorist attacks and train wrecks.  I promoted to detective four years ago and started working in the Homicide Unit, where my specialty is vehicular homicide.  Basically, if there’s a car involved, it’s mine, but I work on plenty of our other homicides as well.

HW: I have to believe that working homicide is what gives your horror fiction another layer of credibility that we don’t find in a lot of other authors’ work. How much of your day job seeps into your writing?

JM:  Quite a bit, actually.  I write about cops a lot, and I use my fiction as a way to purge some of the stuff I deal with everyday.  I won’t get too maudlin on you, but I see a lot of freaked out shit on a daily basis, and writing horror fiction gives me a good outlet for some of the pent up feelings of injustice and senseless cruelty I live with.

But you know, I also have an aesthetic reason for writing about cops.  Have you ever noticed that there are basically two ways to tell a story about monsters?  The first way to write about monsters is to start your story at the point where the monsters are already part of the world, which you see in Charlaine Harris’ books, for example.  Both stories have their strong points and their weaknesses.  I used the second method for my novel Dead City and its sequel, Resistance, which will be coming out next year from Permuted Press.

But in the second case you have those stories that involve a single person, or even a small group of people, dealing with a supernatural presence in their lives.  There is this process of denial and acceptance that the characters have to go through to make the story work.  In other words, they have to go from seeing the world just like the rest of us to acknowledging that there is another level to our world, one that only they are aware of and will never be able to share with the rest of the world.  Dan Simmons’ Carrion Comfort is a great example of this.  So too is Peter Straub’s Ghost Story.  Now imagine cops in this second situation.  They are, by definition, instruments of legitimization.  If a cop puts it in his report, it becomes a matter of public record.  If the report shows up in court, what’s in that report must be shown to be valid and legitimate if it is to be used as part of our case law, which provides the precedent for all our laws.  So imagine, from a character’s perspective, how complicated this would be.  You have someone who is bound by an oath to report factually suddenly confronted by something that is, in most people’s experience, devoid of facts to support it.  Cops are therefore knocked back on their heels in a horror story, and when you do that to a character, they jump off the page...and that’s what every writer wants to achieve.      

HW: OK, back in 2006 you published DEAD CITY with Pinnacle. In that story, San Antonio (and most of Texas) is dealing with the aftermath of five massive hurricanes, plus a virus that is returning the thousands of dead back to life. It’s cover-to-cover mayhem and thrills. Tell us about writing DEAD CITY.

JM:  DEAD CITY was written while I was still a patrolman in the Emergency Operations Command.  Basically I was spending every day designing disasters that San Antonio might actually suffer, and then figuring out how to respond to those disasters.  It was kind of like playing Risk, only with real people and equipment.  So disasters were on my mind a lot.  One of the very real disasters we planned for was the mass evacuation of Texas’ coastal cities in the wake of a hurricane.  I lived through quite a few hurricanes while growing up in Houston and so I knew what they were capable of doing.  I simply took all those elements and put them together into a horror story with my favorite monster of all time, the zombie.

HW: Zombies are big. They were even bigger in 2006. What brought the undead to the front lines of the horror world? Are they still there, or is their popularity beginning to diminish?

JM:  There were a bunch of factors, I think.  You can’t deny that Brian Keene did us all a huge favor when he published THE RISING.  A very cool book, by the way.  But the zombies we know today, the moaning, slow-moving, reanimated corpses, go back to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968.  We’ve had Haitian voodoo zombies several hundred years, but the idea of zombie that pops into our heads when we say ‘zombie’ goes back to 1968.  Zombies were popular in the wake of that film, but still largely underground.  You had MONDO ZOMBIE and THE ULTIMATE ZOMBIE and a few other key anthologies, but Keene’s book basically took the look that was staggering around horror conventions and made it big time.  Since then, there have been a LOT of zombies in print.  Some of the genre is, admittedly, poorly written and reductive.  However, there have been some high points too, such as Max Brooks’ WORLD WAR Z and most everything Permuted Press has published.  But to answer your question I think what makes the zombie so popular is its plasticity.  A zombie is a blank slate, and you can project just about any fear or social criticism you have in mind onto a zombie.  I think that adaptability is why the zombie has so successfully crossed over into pop culture.  The word zombie is now used in economics, computer programming, high finance, and even in literary criticism.  Part of that legitimization though has blunted the zombie’s capacity to terrify.  So, yeah, I can definitely see hardcore horror fans stepping back from them eventually.  I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon, though.  You should see some of the zombie books that are going to be coming out in the next two years.  I have been invited to read a good deal of it for review purposes, and you better hold on, because it’s going to get a lot scarier before it, ahem, dies off.

HW: Did you write DEAD CITY to cash in on the zombie craze, or did you just finish the book at the right time?

JM:  No, DEAD CITY was my first novel, and quite frankly, I just wanted to tell a cool zombie story based on my own unique approach.  Now that DEAD CITY is going into its 5th printing at Kensington, well, I feel that I got in at just the right time.  I’m thankful for that.

HW: Now, you have a brand new book out called QUARANTINED, not to be confused with the rabies movie that came out a while back. Tell us a little about the book.

JM:  Okay, do you remember several years back when George Bush said we may have to consider quarantining a section of US population in the event of a deadly outbreak of the flu?  Well, having studied the flu and all of the other public safety matters that go with outbreaks and pandemics as a policeman, I thought, “My God, that is the craziest suggestion I have ever heard.”  But then I thought, “Wow, what a cool idea for a horror story.”  So, I locked San Antonio up behind a huge military quarantine, threw in a murder and a governmental conspiracy, and we were off and running with Quarantined.

HW: Once again, we’re back in San Antonio. Why do you choose to set your stories in San Antonio? Does the city simply lend itself well to your brand of horror?

JM:  I was recently interviewed for the San Antonio Express News and the reporter asked me, “Do you hate us?  Why do you keep killing off San Antonio in everything you write?”  Well, no, I don’t hate San Antonio.  In fact, I love it.  I came to San Antonio in 1987, thought it was the most beautiful place I had ever seen, and stayed.  The thing is, I know an awful lot about San Antonio’s economy, infrastructure, and municipal resources.  I also know a great deal about disasters.  And I’ve got a bunch of disasters still ahead.

HW: And how about the viruses? Two novels, two viruses. Do you have a personal fear of germs being the downfall of humanity?

JM:  A personal fear...well, no, not really.  I think we are our own worst enemy, to be sure.  Biohazards are big though.  There is a randomness there you can play with as a writer and fear as a reader.

HW: QUARANTINED comes to us from Lachesis Publishing. Why the change in publishing houses?

JM:  It’s not a change, really.  QUARANTINED is a short, fast novel.  It’s actually a good hundred pages shorter than DEAD CITY, and that put it below Kensington’s word limits.  So I knew from the beginning that I would need to find another home for it.  I went with Lachesis because I knew it would fit their profile.  I’m also doing books with Permuted Press and several more with Kensington as well...so there was no change in publishers, just a widening of my scope.

HW: What’s been the biggest difference in working with a mass market publisher vs the small press?

JM:  Marketing and distribution.  When you work with a large publisher like Kensington, your book makes it into the brick and mortar stores, it gets up on the various online bookstores, and it comes out on the exact day they told you it would come out when you signed the contract a year before.  That’s what the big guys can do for you...and believe me, that’s a lot.  The smaller presses have their advantages too, though.  For example, you get a lot of say as to what goes on your cover.  And you can also work closely with your editors and publisher, which is great.

HW: Speaking of the small press, you’re in the midst of editing a zombie anthology for 23 House. How’s that going?

JM:  I am having a blast with this anthology.  My co-editor, Michelle McCrary, is fantastic, as are the folks at 23 House.  So far I have seen some great submissions.  And maybe this would be a good time to talk about the two most common types of zombie stories.  I have seen some wonderful stories, like I said, but I’ve also seen some worn out tropes used over and over.  It seems the most commonly exploited philosophical theme in zombie fiction is nihilism, and people generally come down on one side or the other.  You have those people who reject the world, and their stories generally involve the narrator turning into a zombie or about to turn into a zombie.  Then you have those who can’t bring themselves to abandon the world, and they usually write stories in which they are going to have a baby, or rescue a baby, or something similar.  I’d say these two types of stories make up about ninety percent of the submissions I’ve received.  I take my joy from the other ten percent, those stories that really play with the potential of the zombie story.  And so far, I haven’t been disappointed.

HW: Where can your fans mob you to get your autograph? What are you doing to promote QUARANTINED?

JM:  I make regular appearances at Texas conventions, such as Texas Frightmare (in Dallas), ApolloCon (Houston), and ArmadilloCon (Austin).  And I’m starting to widen my net a little more, too.  I’d like to start hitting some cons up along the East and West Coasts in the next few years.  I also make fairly regular book signing tours through San Antonio, Austin, Houston, and the surrounding areas.  As for promoting QUARANTINED I am running print ads in Cemetery Dance and a few other print magazines.  I’m also doing readings and other public appearances in and around Texas.

HW: Do you have another project in the works? If so, what can you tell us about it?

JM:  Quite a bit, actually.  I’ve got the zombie anthology from 23 House Publishing, which is scheduled for release in summer, 2010.  I have RESISTANCE, the sequel to DEAD CITY due out in the fall of 2010 from Permuted Press and I’ve already signed on to do the third book in that series as well.  I also have a police procedural ghost story called Inheritance coming out in 2011, a short novel called THE LOST GIRL OF THE LAKE, co-written with Michael McCarty, and a crime novel called DODGING BULLETS.  There are also about ten short stories coming out in the next eighteen months or so, so I’m keeping busy.

HW: What should I have asked you about (other than getting out of traffic tickets) that I forgot to ask? Anything else you’d like to add?

JM:  I think we covered it.  This was fun.  If anybody wants to come by and hear my rants they can join me at http://www.joemckinney.wordpress.com.

HW: Thanks again, Joe, for giving us so much of your time. Best of luck with all your projects!

Missed an Interview? Check out the Interview Archives