Ray Garton's Blog, page 5

DARK SHADOWS: It's Open Season on Burton and Depp

I've come to feel a kind of connection with Tim Burton because he keeps reviving my childhood.  He directed the first big Batman movie, which I loved.  He remade Planet of the Apes, which I didn't like, but still.  He directed The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which was my favorite Disney cartoon as a boy.  And now, he's resurrected another childhood touchstone, Dark Shadows.  We're in the same age group and seem to have grown up being shaped by the same things.


Dawn and I seldom go to the movies these days, but saw Dark Shadows to celebrate our anniversary, and it was an enjoyable two hours.  But it sure has stirred up a shitstorm of Burton-bashing.  Reading the reviews, you'd think Burton was guilty of some kind of crime.


One review after another attacked Burton for repeating himself, for being a purveyor of style over substance, for wearing out his whole gothy schtick, for putting Johnny Depp in too many of his movies — essentially, they have attacked Tim Burton for ... being Tim Burton.


In his review for ABC News, David Blaustein writes, "It’s no surprise that Johnny Depp is fantastic as the anachronistic Barnabas, and much of the film’s fun comes from his struggle to relate to 1972 America."  Then, in the next paragraph, he writes, "Depp and Tim Burton once were like that fantastic young couple who couldn’t keep their hands off each other.  We looked at them and thought, 'Wow, those two are amazing together.'  After a while, though, their PDA grows predictable and unimpressive, to the point that you wish they’d just break up already."


Beth Accamando writes in a review for KPBS, "The film continues a run of disappointing Burton-Depp collaborations ... They have gotten so bad that I actually look to each of their new films together with a sense of dread rather than eager anticipation.


Many other reviews say basically the same things.  Is it time for us to turn on Burton now?  I guess I haven't been paying attention to the schedule.  I'll sit this celebrity take-down out, if you don't mind.  I still find Burton to be one of the most interesting directors working today.  I like some of his movies more than others — like I said, I didn't like Planet of the Apes, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory left me a little cold — but Burton's misses are usually more interesting these days than most of the directors out there at the top of their game.  I know that even if the new Burton movie turns out to be one of his lesser works, it's still going to be worth seeing simply because it's Burton and I like what he does, I enjoy his sensibilities.  It all comes down to personal taste, of course.  But it certainly does seem that a memo went out to movie critics notifying them that it's open season on Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, because most of the reviews of Dark Shadows are not really reviews of the movie but of Burton and Depp and their body of work together.


Dark Shadows is not Tim Burton's best movie, but it manages to gently spoof the beloved old '60s soap opera without disrespecting it, and most of all, the movie is rendered in Burton's distinctive visual style, which I always enjoy.  As I've said before, it would be next to impossible to make a serious adaptation of Dark Shadows these days because vampires and witches are ... well, come on, let's face it, they're a little silly.  A spoof was the only way to go, and I think Burton pulled it off delightfully.


It could not have a better cast.  Chloe Grace Moretz is hilarious as bratty teenager Carolyn Stoddard — she is a master of the disapproving sneer.  Helena Bonham Carter plays Dr. Julia Hoffman as a prickly drunk for whom nearly everything in life is an imposition.  Michelle Pfeiffer doesn't have a lot to do, but she looks great doing it.  Jackie Earl Haley gets some laughs as handyman Willie Loomis.  But it's Eva Green as the witch Angelique Bouchard and Johnny Depp as Barnabas Collins who remain the focus of the film and they eat the movie up with abandon.


For my money, Tim Burton is one of very few directors who are able to capture those nonexistent worlds that lurk only in our dreams, nightmares and fantasies and put them on the screen in a way that looks — and, more importantly, feels — right, that makes us nod and say, "Yep, that's it!  He's got it!"  Also in that category are Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro.  So I'll keep seeing Burton's movies, even if he's passed his expiration date with the critics.


One of my favorite things about Dark Shadows is that at no point in the film do vehicles turn into giant, deafening robots.  No aliens blow up a city and no one dons a superhero costume and flies away to make the world safe for corporate America.  I did not have to take Dramamine before seeing the movie because there were no spastic hand-held cameras trying to convince me that the movie was made by amateurs under stressful conditions.  Given all that, the movie is almost subversive.


Dark Shadows is an amusing, silly trifle designed to entertain and make you smile, and that's all it's meant to be.  As far as I'm concerned, that's reason enough to recommend it.

My Brother from Another Mother

Decades ago, when I was a still dreaming about being a professional writer, a man came to the Seventh-day Adventist college I’d attended — Pacific Union College in Angwin, California — and spoke about writing. Not just any man, but an actual writer.  A pro!  A NOVELIST !  I wasn’t attending the college at the time and missed the guest speaker but heard about his appearance later from a friend.  I found it hard to believe.

A novelist  had spoken at a Sadventist college?  A writer of fiction — the stuff that Sadventist founder and “prophet” Ellen G. White had claimed god had shown her to be so bad for people?  The stuff that made people “go through life with a diseased imagination, magnifying every little grievance?”  The stuff that did so much damage to the human mind that it caused people to be “afflicted with paralysis from no other cause than excess in reading?”  The stuff that turned people into “mental inebriates?”  (I’m not making this shit up — it comes from Ellen G. White’s book Messages to Young People.)

Even more interesting was the fact that this man, like me, had been raised a Sadventist — and he was a writer anyway!  I knew that meant he’d been told by many people throughout his life that his writing talent was really Satan working through him to harm others, so I knew that his accomplishment was one that had required not only real ability, but a lot of courage, as well.   I made a note of his name:  Steven Spruill.  I found some of his work and read it, and my mind was further blown.  He wrote science fiction!  He wrote thrillers!  He even wrote horror!  It’s like this guy was some kind of future me!  At least, I hoped so.

Some years later, I attended a convention in Tucson shortly after the publication of my first novel, Seductions, and he was there.  I met him in a hotel corridor where he was chatting with F. Paul Wilson.  It was an inauspicious meeting — we talked for a while, then moved on.  But it hit me hard.  Steven Spruill was, to me, a pioneer.  He had managed to hack his way out of the Seventh-day Adventist jungle of fear and paranoia, of self-loathing and repression, and do with his life the very thing I wanted to do with mine.  He’d cut a trail that I could follow.

That was about 28 years ago.  During the intervening years, having met in person only that one time, Steve and I have become more than the best of friends — we refer to one another as “my brother from another mother.”  Our lives paralleled each other in ways that would be creepy if it weren’t for the fact that such parallels are common between people raised in the Sadventist cult.  We both had attended Sadventist schools and engaged in the same kinds of activities growing up; we both had instilled in us the great gifts of Sadventism — fear, paranoia, and a sense of no self worth, a dirty feeling of self-loathing that, according to our parents and friends, could be addressed only by the teachings of the Sadventist cult, along with the thoroughly insane (and mostly plagiarized) writings of the cult’s alcoholic, masturbation obsessed, and — according to the cult — absolutely infallible Victorian-era prophet Ellen White.  And yet, he had managed to navigate his way through all that and become something that, according to the cult, he was not supposed to become:  A novelist.

If you’re raised in Sadventism and attend its schools, if you live the beginning years of your life in that cult, abiding by its rules, having your head filled with its teachings, you find later that your childhood and teen years were very, very different from those of other people — different to the point of being weird, even creepy.  When you try to tell others about it, they express shock and say things like, “They really taught you that?  And you believed it?”  The only other people who can truly understand it are those who’ve gone through it themselves.  This is not limited to Sadventism.  I’ve heard the same thing from ex-Mormons and people raised in other sects that are even more restrictive and dominating than mainstream Christianity.  When you find someone who shares those experiences, you can speak in a kind of shorthand and be clearly and instantly understood.  They start nodding knowingly before you’re even done with the sentence you’re speaking.  They’ve been through it.  They’ve been damaged by it.  They know what you’re talking about.

But even more bonding was the fact that our reactions to that upbringing — our thoughts about the things we were taught, the way we processed that information and the way it was integrated into our lives and personalities, and the way we’d turned out — were startlingly similar, nearly identical in most ways.  We had sustained the same damages and harbored the same insecurities and self-hatreds that were so common among Sadventists.  But we had something a lot of ex-Sadventists didn’t — each other.  And we shared a passion for writing.

I’ve learned a lot from Steve’s smooth writing, from his mastery of character, pacing, and suspense.  I’m in awe of his range.  He’s written science fiction novels like The Psychopath Plague , The Imperator Plot , and The Paradox Planet .  He’s written horror novels like the hemophage trilogy Rulers of Darkness (nominated for the British Fantasy Award, the novel that coined the term “hemophage”), Daughters of Darkness and Lords of Light , and a favorite of mine, The Genesis Shield .  The trilogy deals with vampires, and that fourth title is a zombie novel — but they are unlike any other vampire or zombie fiction you’ve ever read and take a scientific and medical approach to those traditional genre creatures.  His medical thrillers — Painkiller , Before I Wake , My Soul to Take — are unnerving.  He’s written about other monsters, as well — the Loch Ness monster in Hellstone (the first Spruill book I read) and a creature at large in the Pentagon in Sleeper , another favorite of mine and a book that smacks with authenticity (Steve’s wife Nancy is Director of Acquisition, Resources, and Analysis at the Pentagon).  In his most recent novel, Ice Men , Steve has used all the skills he’s exhibited in his long career to capture the filth and blood and screams of the nearly forgotten Korean War and plunges the reader into it thoroughly and helplessly.  At the moment, he’s finishing up a new thriller that sounds like it’s going to kick some serious ass, and I can’t wait to read it.

In recent years, the publishing industry has experienced some tectonic shifts that have created a lot of upheaval.  A business once dominated by New York publishers has been fractured by print-on-demand, electronic publishing and self-publishing, creating confusion and a lot of frantic scrambling.  Through no fault of their own, a lot of great, established writers have kind of been lost in the shuffle.  But Steve has not stopped telling the stories he must tell and writing the things he has to write — like any writer, he has no choice in the matter.  Steve walked away from a career as a clinical psychologist to write — and that was after being raised to believe that fiction is a wicked thing that does real physical harm to people.  So a little fuss in the publishing business isn’t going to stop him.

But it’s a bit disheartening to know that the author of 16 novels and a nonfiction book — Absorbing Sponge Bob: Ten Ways to Squeeze More Happiness Out of Life — a writer who’s received starred reviews in Kirkus and Publishers Weekly, whose novels have sold in more than 20 foreign countries and have been condensed by Good Housekeeping magazine and Reader’s Digest Books, whose novels have been selections of the Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club, and who received Catholic University of America's award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Literature can be buried in the rubble of the quakes that have been shaking the publishing business.

That’s why I’m writing this — to let you know that if you haven’t read Steven Spruill, you should.  If you’re a writer or want to be a writer, you should be reading his blog at his website, where he discusses the details of writing and offers valuable advice, encouragement, and support to those of us who’ve been bitten by this tenacious bug.

I’m not writing this simply because he’s my brother from another mother.  I’m writing it because good writing is good writing and it deserves to be read.  Steven Spruill has created a lot of worlds, and he has plenty more in him.  While he’s finishing up that new thriller, get to know his work.  By the time it’s done, you’ll be dying to read it.

DARK SHADOWS: Yesterday's Monsters

Someone recently told me that he’d attended a screening of Tim Burton’s new film Dark Shadows, which revives the popular supernatural daytime soap opera from the late 1960s. When he told me it was a parody, that Burton has played the whole thing for laughs, my heart sank. I had been looking forward to this movie with great anticipation. The TV series helped introduce me to the horror genre as a little boy and I was kind of fanatical about it back then. It used to scare the piss out of me. Over forty years later, I still vividly remember specific scenes from the show and how I used to cover my eyes in terror. Surely Tim Burton wouldn’t turn the terror of my childhood into a joke ... would he?

Then I saw the trailer and knew it was true. But after giving it a little thought, I began to realize that my disappointment wasn’t very logical and that Burton’s decision to make a comedy was not only sensible but the only viable option. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the arc of the old soap opera mirrors the arc of the horror genre in which I’ve worked for the better part of three decades.

Created and produced by Dan Curtis, the show aired weekday afternoons from 1966 to 1971. That’s not a terribly long run, but still, it racked up an impressive 1,225 episodes, more than any other English language genre series in history, including the long-running Dr. Who. Dark Shadows is one of the very few classic soaps that managed to keep all of its episodes intact except one. It went into syndication in 1975 and reruns were airing on the SyFy Channel as late as 2003. It got off to a slow start as a gothic soap, with no supernatural elements at all. Critics dubbed it a plodding bore. But that changed as things in Collinwood began to get weird, and when the vampire Barnabas Collins, played by Shakespearean actor Jonathan Frid, was introduced a year into the series, its popularity skyrocketed.

When I think of Dark Shadows, I remember those bright childhood afternoons when merely hearing Robert Cobert’s creepy opening theme music would make me tense up with a happy kind of dread. It came on immediately after General Hospital, which my mother watched faithfully in those days. She did not like the fact that I watched Dark Shadows because it involved ghosts, witches, warlocks, werewolves, zombies, and, most famously, Barnabas the vampire, and Mom knew that Jesus approved of none of those things. But she let me watch it out of guilt, I think, because she knew Jesus wouldn’t approve of General Hospital, either, what with so many doctors fucking so many nurses (off screen, of course), so she allowed me to have my guilty pleasure because she had hers. It was a kind of mutual sin agreement, I guess. I felt no guilt about watching Dark Shadows, though. I felt excitement and thrills and suspense, and thanks to Angelique the witch, played by the wickedly beautiful Lara Parker, I also felt some things in my shorts that I did not yet understand.

When I think of Dark Shadows, I think of the spooky seances, the curses, the time travel, the creepy music — the soundtrack album still ranks as one of the biggest selling TV soundtrack albums of all time, and the song “Quentin’s Theme,” which was first heard in Dan Curtis’s 1968 TV movie The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, peaked at number 13 on the Billboard Top 100 chart, number three on Billboard’s Easy Listening chart, and earned Cobert a Grammy nomination.

I had the complete collection of Dark Shadows bubblegum cards (which I valued almost as much as my collection of Batman bubblegum cards). I kept them in a graham cracker box and pored over them frequently. They always carried the pink smell of those rectangles of bubblegum with which they’d been packaged and were always slightly gritty with the corn starch that came off that gum. My mother expressed to our pastor her fear that both Dark Shadows and Batman were endangering my eternal soul, so he came over to the house one day, had a long talk with me about the importance of going to heaven, and scared me into burning all of them, along with an assortment of comic books.

It’s difficult to overstate how popular Dark Shadows was back then, especially with kids and teenagers. Well, let's be honest — primarily with kids and teenagers. Mention it in any group of people of a particular age, and they will immediately tell you how fast they rushed home from school to watch the show every afternoon. Jonathan Frid and Lara Parker were rock stars and sex symbols. When Frid made a guest appearance on The Merv Griffin Show in 1969, Griffin said in his introduction, “It has caught on so incredibly that there are the ‘Frid girls’ — I know the whole front of our theater is lined with girls who couldn’t get in tonight and they’re out there screaming and yelling.” Merchandising was rampant — there was even a Barnabas Collins board game, for crying out loud! Dark Shadows remains the only daytime soap opera to spawn two major motion pictures, 1970's House of Dark Shadows (“Come and see how the vampires do it!”) and 1971's Night of Dark Shadows (“Just another night of terror!”). I wasn’t allowed to go to movie theaters (Jesus didn’t approve of those, either), but the TV trailers alone were enough to give me nightmares.

When I think of Dark Shadows, I remember how it used to set my imagination on fire. I would write Dark Shadows stories for my own amusement (long before I knew what fan fiction was) and carefully, meticulously draw picture after picture of the characters with colored pencils. I remember being genuinely terrified in the middle of the afternoon, in broad daylight.

One episode frightened me so much that I hid behind the rocking chair in our living room, and for a while, my mother stopped letting me watch the show. When my grandmother learned about this, she saw a chance to create conflict in our family, which was a hobby she cherished. She lived in a small trailer in our yard and informed me that I was welcome to come to her place to watch Dark Shadows with her every afternoon if my mother wasn’t going to let me watch it. My maternal grandmother was far scarier than Barnabas Collins ever came close to being and more evil than Angelique on her worst day, but because it meant I could watch the show, I got past that. When Mom learned that I was going to Grandma’s to watch Dark Shadows, much animosity ensued. She informed me that I would be watching Satan’s favorite soap opera in our living room from then on, not at Grandma’s.

But when I think of Dark Shadows, I remember the show I watched as a child. I remember how deeply immersed I would become in that world for thirty minutes every weekday afternoon, how emotionally involved I was in the lives of the Collins family. I remember Barnabas baring his fangs and the haunting tune played by Josette’s music box and the severed hand of the mysterious Count Petofi, which was supposed to cure Quentin of his lycanthropy, and so many other things. And I remember how delightfully, deliciously terrifying it all was. I seldom think of Dark Shadows as the adult I was when I watched reruns of the show decades later.

That’s a different memory. Very different.

Sets that wobbled or collapsed, props that broke or wouldn’t work, botched lines, flies buzzing around the actors’ faces, cameras and boom mics coming into view, stagehands creeping around in the background — those are the things I remember seeing in the reruns as an adult. Watching Dark Shadows now, my reaction is quite different than it was back in the late 1960s. Now I cringe and wonder how I ever could have been frightened by it.

None of those screw-ups happened because of incompetence. It was a daily show shot live-to-tape, meaning there were no retakes. The schedule was extremely tight and they had no time to do it over or polish it up. Everything was done once and then the production moved on to the next scene.

Now, it’s not scary ... it’s hilarious. But that did not matter to the show’s young audience at the time. They were hooked. It had the youngest audience of any daytime soap opera, and sadly, that helped kill the show. With the economy plunging, networks began to cut costs. The viewers of Dark Shadows were not appealing enough to advertisers at the time — they were too young to make household purchasing decisions. That, combined with dropping ratings, led ABC to pull the plug on the show and replace it with a new version of Password. Letters poured into the network and some viewers were so angry, they threatened to disrupt the taping of the game show that replaced their favorite soap opera, although that threat was never carried out.

In 1991, Dan Curtis tried to catch lightning in a bottle again with a much more polished version of Dark Shadows that aired in prime time on NBC. This time, the budget was big and the production was glossy. It attracted a large audience initially, but then the network repeatedly preempted the show to cover the Gulf War and ratings declined rapidly. It was cancelled after one season. Another attempt was made to revive the series in 2004 when a pilot was shot for the WB network, but it was never picked up.

And now it’s back. Tim Burton has directed what appears to be a lavish film starring Johnny Depp as Barnabas, but the tone has changed. Now, Barnabas has been revived in 1972 and is a comical fish out of water. It’s funny, but this time, it’s intentionally funny.

I think chances are good that had Burton decided to do Dark Shadows with a straight face, it still would have been funny, because let’s face it, folks, it’s really hard to take vampires seriously these days. Or witches, or werewolves, or just about any of those old traditional horror icons.

When Boris Karloff appeared on movie screens in Jack Pierce’s groundbreaking makeup in the 1931 classic Frankenstein, people screamed. And they meant it! They were horrified. 35 years later, that same makeup was used on Fred Gwynne in the sitcom The Munsters. In that same sitcom, Al Lewis, who played Grandpa, was a vampire who was dressed much like Bela Lugosi in 1931's Dracula, a movie that had women fainting in theaters.

In the years since then, a lot has happened to the vampire. Anne Rice romanticized him starting in 1976, and even more in the years that followed as her Vampire Chronicles became more and more popular. And then in 2005, Stephenie Meyer infantilized and Mormonized the vampire — and, for that matter, the werewolf — in Twilight and the books and movies that followed.

How could we possibly be expected to take Barnabas Collins seriously at this point?

The vampire no longer works in the horror genre because he has been co-opted by the romance genre — along with the werewolf and the zombie and an assortment of other once frightening creatures. There was a time when the vampire was undead. Now, as far as the horror genre is concerned, he’s just dead. But he’s not alone.

A used bookstore I patronize recently removed its entire horror section. Remember, this is a used bookstore. This decision was made because no one was buying the books in the horror section. They were just sitting there collecting dust. The store’s owner decided to make room for books that would sell. You can still find books about vampires and werewolves in that store, but you’ll have to look in the romance section.

I don’t think there is a better example of the state of horror fiction than that.

But if you take a peek inside the small and insular community of horror writers and fans, you’ll see something different. Zombies are still looking for a snack, vampires are still baring their fangs and attempts are still being made to breathe life into the werewolf. While you’re there, cock an ear and listen. You’ll hear people wondering why horror doesn’t sell, why publishers aren’t interested in the genre and why nobody but those inside that small, insular community cares anymore. There are very good answers to those questions, but you won’t hear them in the horror community, where people are still taking seriously creatures and ideas that people have been laughing at for years now.

More than anything else, it was probably the success of Stephen King that launched the horror boom of the 1980s. King wrote about vampires in ‘Salem’s Lot and ghosts in The Shining, and he dealt with other traditional horror creatures and ideas, too. But contrary to what a lot of horror fans and even horror writers believe, they were not what made King’s work so popular. What made his novels work so well was everything else in them — the characters and their lives, their problems, their real-world fears. These were people dealing with real problems like domestic abuse and poverty and mental illness. And then, as if those problems and fears weren’t enough, he threw vampires and ghosts and other supernatural threats into their lives. Those supernatural threats worked because the people they threatened were recognizable people living familiar lives with problems that were real and timely. King’s books touched people and spoke to them because he reflected their lives, but with the added excitement of supernatural horror.

At some point, horror fiction stopped touching and speaking to people. It is not reflecting the world in which we live. In 2012, it’s hard to be threatened by vampires and zombies when you’re losing your job, or your home, or you have cancer but have no medical coverage, or when you turn on the news and hear some guy who wants to be president — and may very well succeed — say that things like contraception and abortion and certain sexual acts should be illegal or that people should be jailed for their sexuality alone. Right now, a glance at the skyrocketing price of groceries and gas is scarier than any werewolf. Zombies seem pretty lame when you’re wondering if your son or daughter will be shipped off to yet another war in the Middle East ... and whether or not that son or daughter will be coming home again.

So it’s not too surprising that Tim Burton decided to go for laughs with Dark Shadows, because he probably would have gotten them, anyway. A centuries-old vampire who’s revived in 1972? That’s not even a little creepy anymore. And setting it in 1972 was a good idea, too, because a centuries-old vampire who’s revived in 2012 probably would end up with his own reality TV show.

We live in a time when serial killers have become heroes, for Christ’s sake! Don’t get me wrong, I think Dexter is a fine series, but has anyone stopped to think that we have a hit show with a protagonist who’s a serial killer? NBC just greenlit a weekly primetime series about Hannibal Lecter! Hell, he was scary only 20 years ago, now we’re going to follow his exploits in a primetime series? What's next? Pedophile Crossing Guard on Fox? The Real Rapists of Beverly Hills on Bravo? Vampires don’t stand a chance of being menacing anymore!

My initial reaction to a Dark Shadows parody was wrong. Comedy was the only way it could go. Because it’s not horror anymore. Very few of the things we once considered horror hold any threat these days. The world has changed. The horror genre has a lot of catching up to do. But don't hold your breath.

How to Deal with Writers Effectively in One Easy Lesson

That’s right, if you are a publisher, anthologist, or anyone else who frequently enters into business transactions with writers but often finds them problematic, I am going to tell you how to deal with writers effectively in just one easy lesson made up of two simple, single-syllable words.



PAY THEM.



There seems to be a great deal of confusion about writers. Some people seem to believe that a business transaction with a writer operates under entirely different rules than all the other business transactions they enter into every day of their lives. This can be cleared up very easily with two more simple words:



IT DOESN’T.



This is how business transactions work:



1.) Someone provides a service or product in exchange for a fee.

2.) You need that service or product.

3.) You pay the fee, you get the service or product.



That’s how it works. That’s how it works everywhere. That’s how it has always worked everywhere. If you can’t pay, there is a problem. The problem is that you can’t pay. The problem is NOT that the person who provides the service or product expects payment because, as I pointed out:



THAT’S HOW IT WORKS.



I’ve been a professional, full-time writer for 27 years. During that time, I have heard many brilliantly creative attempts to get around this fact. I’ve even been asked for work by people who have no intention of paying for it and don’t even offer a payment, people who seem incapable of understanding why a professional writer would find that insulting. After hearing all of these approaches enough times, they all begin to sound alike. They run together into a blur of toxic, squirming bullshit that amounts to something resembling this:



“But we’re giving you the chance to be published by us/appear in our anthology/be a part of our team/etc. We thought you would appreciate that. We’re giving you a tremendous opportunity here. We thought you would want to be a part of what we’re doing. We’d like you to be part of our family.”



First of all, I already have a family, and they fucked me up beyond repair. I don’t need another one. And if I decide to find one, I certainly won’t build it around a business transaction.



I’m not asking for any favors, so please don’t offer any, or worse, pretend that you’ve offered one when you haven’t.



No, you’re not giving me a tremendous opportunity if you expect me work for free. What you’re giving me is an unlubricated pineapple right up the anus. I don’t need one of those. I need to be paid for my work. That’s why I’m here.



There was a time in my life when I wrote constantly for my own pleasure. That was before I entered school and during the years I attended school. You’re a little late. You missed it. That time is over. Now I write for a different reason. I like to call that reason:



A LIVING.



There are a lot of writers who do not write for a living. They do other things in addition to writing. Some have entire careers separate from their writing. This does not change a single thing. That writer still provides a service/product and the business transaction is still a business transaction and SHOULD be carried out like any OTHER business transaction.



Let’s say you have a car problem. You take the car to an auto mechanic. The mechanic finds the problem and fixes it. Then the mechanic expects to be paid. But you say, “Look, I’ve had a lot of mechanics work on my car over the years, and now you’re one of them. I appreciate what you’ve done, but I thought you would appreciate being a part of that family of mechanics who also have worked on my car. I’ve done many wonderful things in my car and it’s taken me to many wonderful places, and I thought it would be enough for you simply to be a part of that.”



There is a spectrum of responses you might get that would fall between the mechanic chuckling and saying, “You’re shittin’ me, right?” and the mechanic introducing the business end of a tire iron to your forehead. Nowhere within that spectrum would you find the response, “Okay, sounds good to me. Have a nice day!”



No one is stupid enough to try that — not unless they’re affiliated with a hidden camera prank show on TV. No one is stupid enough to think that a mechanic — or any other professional, for that matter — would accept that kind of insulting bullshit in lieu of payment. No one.



And yet this happens quite frequently to writers. These and other equally insulting and skull-crackingly stupid things are often said in an effort to talk a writer out of being paid and after a while, it can get kind of demoralizing. But you know what?



SOMETIMES THEY WORK.



There’s a reason for this. A lot of people write. Among those people are many who have no self-respect, no confidence in their work, a streak of masochism, and no concern for things like quality, reputation or respect. They have one goal and one goal only, and that is to be published. They will do anything and accept any kind of treatment as long as it results in their name being printed on something somewhere that somebody might read. To them, the sensation of an unlubricated pineapple up the ass is the sound of opportunity knocking.



Those of us who think we’re pretty good at what we do and have some self-respect and would like to be shown some respect and even have a certain fondness for the idea of getting paid for our work have a message for those who fit that description:



KNOCK IT THE FUCK OFF.



We are sane enough, however, to know that’s not going to happen. But we remind those interested in entering into business transactions with writers:



YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR.

NIGHT LIFE: The Story Behind the Book

Never say never. I speak from experience. There was a time when I vowed I would never write a sequel. To anything. I was opposed to sequels because most of them — whether books or movies — were not only inferior to the original but struck me as little more than a cynical attempt to keep cashing in on the popularity of something original and entertaining that was the result of actually applying effort and imagination to its creation rather than just rehashing something that worked the first time. And to be fair, that’s a pretty accurate description of most sequels. There have been exceptions, but they are rare

My erotic vampire novel Live Girls seemed to strike a cord with readers and became quite popular. For the next 18 years, the question I was most commonly asked was, “When are you going to write the sequel to Live Girls?” Not if but when, and not a sequel but the sequel, as if this book already sort of existed in some metaphysical pre-written form and they were just waiting for me to make it available. But I resisted.

I was always sincere when I said there would be no sequels because I wasn’t interested in repeating myself. I meant that. At the time, anyway.

When I finally decided to write a sequel to Live Girls, I was laid up with a lousy hip that, at that point, had required two operations (with a third to come), one of which was a hip replacement that didn’t seem to be working because I was still in tremendous pain. I was full of narcotic painkillers that weren’t all that good at actually killing pain but fucked me up so much that I almost didn’t care about the pain. Almost. Looking back on those eight years, I don’t remember doing much writing. I remember spending most of my time stretched out in a recliner in an altered state of consciousness, and avoiding walking, which only ground at the jagged chunks of broken glass that seemed to be lodged in my right hip. But in fact, I wrote a good deal during those years; I’ve found a number of short stories and novellas that I wrote, but which I have absolutely no memory of writing. Reading them was like reading someone else’s work, but it was mine. It was bizarre.

At some point, I started considering the possibility of writing a sequel to Live Girls. It was the first time I’d advanced to that point — where I was actually considering writing a sequel. The drugs might have had something to do with it, I don't know, but I began thinking about the possibilities. Would it focus once again on Davey Owen? Would he still be with Casey Thorne? 18 years had passed since the publication of Live Girls. Would the sequel take place 18 years later, or would it pick up where the first book left off? I had no idea. But I had a lot of time on my hands and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And then I passed the point of no return. I got an idea I loved. Our first meeting with Davey and Casey in the sequel came to life in my head:

They are having a romantic nighttime picnic at the foot of the “Y” in the Hollywood sign on Mt. Lee overlooking Los Angeles. They are still together all these years later, still in love. And when they leave their mountain picnic, they =fly away.

I had the opening of the novel. Obviously, they had gone west to Los Angeles, because there they were dining beneath the Hollywood sign. And what’s in Los Angeles? The movie business, for one thing. And vampires, of course. This wouldn’t work without vampires. Bloodthirsty vampires in Los Angeles? Hell, it was practically a work of nonfiction!

And that was it. I was hooked. I had to follow it through to the end. The book has kind of a romantic opening, but I knew it would not be a romantic vampire novel.

No matter what story a novel tells, it’s almost always the characters who carry me through the book. I want to find out what they do, who they become, how the story changes them, if at all. I’d forgotten how much I liked Davey Owen. In Live Girls, he’d started out as a pretty spineless, self-pitying and even irresponsible guy but had been forced by extraordinary circumstances — and with the help of Casey Thorne — to grow a pair and grow up. Of course, those extraordinary circumstances would not have gone away. To vampires, 18 years would be like ... brunch. I knew they would not have forgotten Davey and they would still be out for revenge for what he’d done to them in New York. Those vampires still would be after retired journalist Walter Benedek, too, who’d helped Davey back in the Big Apple. I wondered how he would handle that. I had enjoyed writing Walter in Live Girls because I wrote him as one of my favorite movie actors, Walter Matthau, only a little younger. I don't do that sort of thing normally — but Matthau just seemed so right for the role! Suddenly, I looked forward to getting to know these people again.

But I was determined not to repeat myself, and I knew that if I focused on all of the same characters again, that would be pretty hard to avoid. This book would need new characters and much of it would have to be from their points of view. That’s my favorite part of the sequel — the new characters.

Night Life introduces private investigators Karen Moffett and Gavin Keoph. She’s from Los Angeles, he’s from San Francisco, and they meet for the first time when they show up for a meeting with bestselling novelist Martin Burgess, a hugely successful horror writer. Burgess writes about ghosts, demons, vampires, werewolves and other supernatural creatures, and he harbors a genuine curiosity about their origins. He even goes so far as to wonder if they exist. So he hires Moffett and Keoph to investigate some things Burgess has heard about vampires living in Los Angeles. Where would a horror novelist hear such a thing? Burgess has plugged himself into a network of computer geeks who are seriously into the paranormal — extraterrestrials, ghosts, Bigfoot, demons, the Illuminati, a wide variety of conspiracy theories, that sort of thing. They keep him informed. Burgess knows that most of that stuff is nonsense, but when something stands out and looks possibly genuine, he pursues it. This time, he decides to hire professionals to pursue it for him — Gavin and Keoph.

Those three characters were the best part of writing Night Life. I enjoyed getting to know them so much that I knew I would return to them at some point. And I did. Gavin, Keoph and Burgess return in Bestial, the sequel to my werewolf novel Ravenous (another sequel!), which kind of links all four books together. I will be strengthening that link later this year when I begin work on a series of books in which the vampires of Live Girls and Night Life are pitted against the werewolves of Ravenous and Bestial, featuring characters from all four books. Those three characters also show up in Vortex, an upcoming novella from Cemetery Dance that has nothing to do with vampires or werewolves. I enjoyed Vortex so much, I’m considering expanding it into a novel — maybe even a few novels.

Night Life and Bestial aren’t the only times I broke my vow never to write a sequel. I followed my novella The Folks with a sequel (and I’m considering a third to wrap up Andy’s story). And there will be more. I still have ambivalent feelings about sequels, though, and I try hard to keep them in mind when I’m writing one. I try to make sure that sequels be connected in significant ways to the original but tell a different story in a different way.

Night Life is available as a trade paperback and for Kindle from Amazon, for Nook from Barnes and Noble, and in several ebook formats from Fictionwise.com. If you enjoy the book, I hope you’ll post a review of it on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. You can read an excerpt from Night Life here. If you have a Facebook account, drop by the Night Life fan page and click the “like” button, then do the same over at my fan page. To see my full bibliography, keep up with interviews, stories and new books, and interact on the message board, visit my official website.

The vampires in Night Life (and in Live Girls) are not pleasant. They don’t want to discuss your feelings. They don’t attend high school. They don’t sparkle. They’re mean and dangerous. It makes me feel kind of old to know that I’ve been writing long enough for vampires like that to seem refreshing!

MURDER WAS MY ALIBI: The Story Behind the Book

Every novel I’ve written has been a unique experience and has come into the world in its own particular way. Every now and then, a book will drop into my head out of nowhere in one whole piece, but that’s rare. Wonderful, but rare. The most common origin is a “what if” question inspired by something I’ve seen, heard or read. For example, someone might tell me a joke and I’ll laugh ... and then I might think, Hey, what if that really happened? After considering it a while, I might discover that what’s funny when told as a joke would be quite horrifying if it really happened to someone, and that might lead to a novel. Some novels are difficult to trace back to a specific origin. The seed of an idea will plant itself in my head at some point, then grow slowly over time until it’s ready to write. Sometimes I might be inspired by something — a conversation I overheard, perhaps, or a story in the news — that doesn’t really take the form of an idea ... just inspiration and the desire to write. I’ll sit down and start writing with nothing in particular in mind, and it will turn into a novel right in front of my eyes — that’s how Sex and Violence in Hollywood happened.

Murder Was My Alibi began with a man’s name: Myron Foote.

I don’t know where it came from or why it lodged itself so firmly in my head and refused to go away. I liked the sound of it. It was an unusual name and had a nice ring to it. What kind of person would have that name? For some reason, it sounded cynical to me, the name Myron Foote. I could not imagine him as a happy-go-lucky guy, a good-natured type who tended to look on the bright side of things. I don’t know why, but Myron Foote sounded to me like a man who would notice things others didn’t and would be bothered by many of them. That led to him becoming a private investigator, which took me directly to my keyboard, where I started writing.

For the last decade or so, I’ve probably read more crime fiction than anything else, and a good deal of the crime fiction I’ve read was written in the first half of the twentieth century. The work of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler opened up a world I’d only glimpsed in great old black-and-white movies about tough-talking gumshoes and dangerous dames. Don’t get me wrong — those movies were iconic and I became a fan of them when I was very young. But the books of Hammett, who invented the tough-talking private eye subgenre of crime fiction, Chandler and many others of that time did not have the benefit of glossy cinematography or a swelling score to blunt their sharp edges. They were snapshots of a bleak world in which no one could be trusted and good things like love and friendship were twisted into hostile acts.

Those books led me into the grim world of noir. Most people in the know about this sort of thing seem to agree that noir pretty much began with James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. It's a cynical genre, with protagonists who are not detectives investigating crimes but men trapped in the consequences of crimes. Sometimes these men are wrongly accused of a crime and sometimes they’re guilty as hell, but they are always losers. They’re driven by lust, greed and quite often by some twisted, unhealthy desires, and they’re self-destructive in all kinds of ways, as if they know what lies ahead is bad and they’d rather hasten their own demise to avoid it.

The world of noir makes the world of the street-tough private eye seem optimistic by comparison. And it is! Those private eyes might talk tough, drink too much and hang out with lowlifes, but they have their own ethics, to which they adhere rigidly, even though everyone around them is rotten to the core. The protagonists of noir fiction have no such ethics; they’re as rotten as everyone else in that world and they know it, just as they know they are doomed. In noir, everybody gets what’s coming to them, and it’s never good.

The land of noir has been inhabited by some astonishingly talented writers like Cornell Woolrich, Jim Thompson, Gil Brewer, David Goodis, W.R. Burnett, Charles Williams and so many others, some of whom lived pretty bleak lives themselves. And talented writers continue to keep the genre alive. The noir universe is a fun place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. It allows us to strip away all the decorations we hang on our lives in order to avoid the fact that we’re all infinitesimal specks in the universe hurtling directly to our deaths, an entertaining existential panic from which we can walk away unscathed and return to our undamaged lives.

When Myron Foote, the name that had been stuck in my head for a while, became a private investigator, I knew I was entering some configuration of these two universes, and when I came through on the other side, I had Murder Was My Alibi tucked under my arm.

Myron Foote is a private eye on the wrong side of the tracks who doesn’t like to be on the receiving end of violence but is sometimes a little too quick to hand it out to others. From his dumpy little office on the edge of the red light district, he works bottom-of-the-barrel divorce cases ... until a gorgeous redhead walks into his life and offers him $105,000 to pose as her uncle Percy. It sounds simple. Too simple. But who could turn down that kind of money? Or that kind of redhead?

More than one hundred thousand dollars soon becomes more than one million dollars and the job takes him down a dark path littered with lies and secrets, blackmail and murder. It’s a path that leads straight into Cynthia Thacketer’s arms ... and into a deadly trap. Soon, all that stands between Foote and life in prison is an alibi he cannot use.

Murder Was My Alibi is set in the northern California town of Redding, where I was born and raised. But it’s not really Redding. It’s an alternate Redding, a darker Redding — a Redding that has a red light district, for one thing. Actual locations coexist with fictional places that never existed.

Purists, of course, will tell you that noir is not about private eyes, and stories about private eyes are not noir. I’m not going to dispute that. But you’ll find elements of both in Murder Was My Alibi. It’s available as a mass market paperback, for Kindle from Amazon, for Nook from Barnes and Noble and in several ebook formats from Fictionwise. You can read an excerpt of Murder Was My Alibi here. To see my full bibliography, visit my website, and while you’re there, register at the message board and start a discussion. If you have a Facebook account, drop by the Murder Was My Alibi page and click the "like” button. Then drop by my fan page and do the same. If you read and enjoy the book, I hope you'll post a review of it on Amazon or Barnes and Noble — or anywhere else you like!