A Dozen Black Roses, the fourth book in your Sonja Blue series has just been released as an eBook from Open Road Media. For those not familiar with the Sonja Blue series can you tell us a bit about it?
In A Dozen Black Roses, my anti-hero, vampire/vampire slayer Sonja Blue, comes to an inner city neighborhood that has become the private fiefdom of a pair of rival vampires. She plays both of the bloodsuckers against each other while trying to rescue a human woman one of them is keeping as a concubine with the help of a disgraced priest and an old hippie. It is my tribute to spaghetti westerns/Italian exploitation cinema of the 1960s-1980s, and Sergio Leone’s A Fist Full of Dollars in particular. It was originally written as a tie-in to White Wolf Games’ popular World of Darkness, crossing over my Sonja Blue character with their Vampire: The Masquerade role-playing game. As such, it existed outside the Sonja Blue canon. This is a heavily revised rewrite, where I have removed all the references to White Wolf’s intellectual property (done with their permission), so it is now part of Sonja’s official timeline.
In addition to the Sonja Blue series you’ve also had Tempter and Angels on Fire re-released as ebooks. How comfortable are you generally with seeing the re-appearance of older work?
I’m comfortable with it, especially given the fact I took the occasion to go back and revise/update the manuscripts. Angels on Fire didn’t really require much revision, just reformatting—but Tempter is considerably different from what was originally published in 1990. The original version had vampires shoehorned into it by my publisher. They have since been removed. This version is closer to what I originally intended—a story about ghosts, reincarnation, and voodoo curses. I tend to think of it as Tempter 2.0.
Why the fascination with vampires?
I became a horror fan during the early 1960s, back when Hammer was putting out their groundbreaking Dracula series with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, and grew up watching Dark Shadows. Pop culture was as vampire-centric then as it is now, although not aimed so much at the teenybopper demographic. Vampires are handy characters, as they can do double duty as monster/villains and the classic misunderstood romantic hero. They’re also one of the few monsters that not only look like us, but also used to be us, so they lend themselves to drama and subtext about the human condition. They can represent anything from mankind’s inherent predatory nature to the exploitation of the worker by the ruling class to the allure of the “bad boy” (or femme fatale, depending on your preference). As monsters, they reflect cruelty and selfishness, and as heroes they symbolize the loneliness of the “other”, forever outside the boundaries of society and time itself.
You wrote vampire stories long before the latest surge of popularity. How do you feel the genre has changed over the years?
To be fair, I started writing vampire stories back when Anne Rice’s takes on vampires were all the rage, so I have surfed from one wave of popularity to the next. What changed in between was the age of the demographic. In the 1940s-1970s the average reader of what would be called ‘horror’ fiction was predominantly male. That started changing in the 1960s, with the rise in popularity of gothic romance—as best typified by the success of the Dark Shadows TV soap opera. More and more women started reading horror, especially the vampire stories, which have always had a dark romantic element to them, dating back to Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla. The female demographic became even larger with the Anne Rice vampire series and continued to grow. The real difference between Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series is that the stories went from being aimed at adults (largely women) to tween-aged girls. And it damn near destroyed the genre by trying to sanitize them for a Young Adult readership. Even more alarming, it actively encouraged readers to identify with vampires as opposed to humans, to the point of romanticizing abusive behavior. This was a trend I first saw with the Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles, and it’s only gotten worse over the decades. Sonja Blue was originally created as an antidote to what I perceived as Toothless Vampire Syndrome. In my books vampires are monsters and becoming one costs your soul. Sonja Blue fights as hard as she can to maintain what’s left of her humanity, even though it is far easier—and natural—for her to embrace monstrosity. Sonja’s motto is No Sparkling Allowed. In addition, I should point out that I write about other things besides vampires—but that seems to be what audiences prefer to read.
How did you start writing? Was there a particular book or moment in your life that spurned you on?
I’ve been writing in some way, shape, or form for as long as I can remember. According to my parents, I was drawing stories and narrating them to my family members at the age of three, long before I learned to either read or write. My early childhood reading—Dr. Seuss, Roald Dahl, E.B. White, Madeline L’Engle—were all huge influences on me. As were movies and TV shows—stories are stories, whether you read them or watch them. It was always a given within my extended family that I was going to grow up to be a writer. It was just a matter of when I’d finally catch a break.
How do you structure a story? Do you heavily outline, loosely outline, pure discovery? What works best for you?
It’s a combination of detailed outline and discovery. I try to break down the action and outline it from chapter to chapter, but I give myself the freedom to go off-road if something isn’t working or a better idea represents itself.
What has been most surprising to you in your writing and publishing career so far?
It’s a toss-up between the unparalleled rise in the Young Adult market and how publishers no longer market anything as ‘horror’ while still turning out scores of books about vampires, demons, werewolves, and serial killers.
Would you care to pass on any advice to writers starting out? What was the best advice you were ever given when starting out?
The best advice I got as a writer was also the first advice, which came from the late fantasy author and editor Karl Edward Wagner: Any agent who charges to look at your work is a crook. I will add to that, however, a bit of wisdom from my father that I should have paid more attention to: Get Yourself a Trade—something to fall back on when times are lean.
How are you finding the e-book revolution? Personally, are you happy with an e-reader these days, or do you still prefer ‘tree-books’?
These are interesting times. There are upsides and downsides to it—the upside being the ease of getting old work back into ‘print’ and making it available to a new generation. The downside is the problem with piracy and the fact that you’re competing with a billion other authors on the same platforms for a limited amount of time, attention, and money from readers. Working as my own publicist is a huge creative drain. That’s why I handed things over to Open Road—they have a background in print publication and understand the importance of PR and advertising, etc. In addition, they provide the option of eventually making the books available in Print On Demand, as well as cover design, without charging me up front.
What kind of books do you read, any favourite authors?
I read a lot of old school noir—Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, that kind of thing. I also enjoy J.G. Ballard and writers like Robert R. McCammon, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, Ramsey Campbell, and Brian Lumley.
What’s next? What other projects are you working on at the moment?
I have been writing comics for the last year or so for Dynamite Entertainment. My run on the monthly Vampirella comic ends in August 2015 with the 13th issue. I have just taken over the reins of their Army of Darkness comic book series (it is tied into Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead series). I also co-wrote a Red Sonja mini-series this year called Red Sonja: The Vulture’s Circle., IDW has released Sunglasses After Dark: The Full Blooded Collection— the 20 year anniversary edition of the comic book adaption of the first Sonja Blue novel, and both Sunglasses and its direct sequel, In The Blood, are available in paperback from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.com as part of Open Road’s POD program. I hope to have more news about other projects fairly soon.
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Interview by Dag Rambraut – SFFWorld.com © 2015
