M.R. Gott's Blog, page 33

A Passage to Now

Thanks to Alan Chin for mentioning Where the Dead Fear to Tread at his blog, A Passage to Now

M.R. Interviews...J.F. Lewis

Please Welcome J.F. Lewis to Cutis Anserina

Eric in the Void City series is an incredibly unique character, was he a conscience creation or did he emerge to you through his actions?

I'm not sure. I've described Eric as "all the things I'd never say and all the venom I'll never spew". But that's kind of a misleading statement, because Eric's opinions are often not mine, even if we do have the same taste in music and the same favorite movie.

Eric was created partially out of a desire to write about a vampire who would not be the typical (or typical at the time) angst ridden vampire hero who really didn't have all that much to be depressed about. There had been a fairly long line of tormented vampires who were super cool, utterly gorgeous, perfectly graceful and polite, yet constantly acted as if not being able to go outside during the day and having to drink a little blood every night was the end of the world.  It annoyed me.  A lot.   With Eric, I wanted to show vampirism as truly unpleasant, but have him still not be all that tortured by it. 

Does the Void City series have a final endpoint you are working toward, or are you taking it book by book, section by section?

There is an endcap storyline for Eric that I have in mind, but it kind of revolves around several other characters I'd like to write books about first. There are other storylines I might want to explore in the Void City universe; Eric may be in them, but he wouldn't be the focus like he has been in the books thus far.
You are often listed as an author of Urban Fantasy but you give off a bit of a horror vibe to me.  How do you view these two genres?

Urban Fantasy crosses a lot of genre lines. I straddle the fence between horror and dark comedy, but romance and mystery aspects pop up from time to time. Some of my favorite urban fantasy books might have been horror novels if the central protagonist hadn't possessed supernatural abilities. Does that make sense? (It Does)

What literary character left a strong mark on you?  How so?

My ideal protagonist is Corwin from Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber. He cuts a fine line between a hero and an anti-hero, and his first-person commentary on those around him can be cuttingly funny. His sarcastic wit is something I love. Growing up, I was also a huge fan of Moorcock's Elric and Robert E. Howard's Conan.  That probably comes through in my action scenes; at least I hope it does.  (Love Howard, and it does)

You have a bit of anti-Twilight material on your website with your "Just say no to sparkly vampires,"  promos.  Care to elaborate on this at all?

Heh. I have nothing against Twilight, but I was lurking in a forum and saw where someone described STAKED as "Exactly like Twilight, except with real vampires" and it amused me.  Then a few years later, while I was doodling on my iPad I drew Wolfy and thought he looked cute, so I made a silly little ad out of that image and people seemed to find it amusing.  Strange things happen when I doodle on my iPad.

What author most influenced you as a writer how?

That would be Zelazny again. Until I read the Amber series, I hated first person narratives.  After Amber, I understood that it was the narrators I hated, not the style. To make first person POV work, it has to be fun to be in that character's head. You have have to love hanging out with them and hearing what they have to say. It helps if your POV character is a bit of a prick.  The exception to that is Michael Stackpole's Dark Glory War. That book rocks, and the main character is a really nice guy.

Any new information coming down the pipeline you would like to share?

BURNED comes out January 2012...  Eric actually has a plan and is being proactive. Plus there is also tons more Greta POV which should please folks who have been following the series. New readers could just jump in with book four, though you certainly miss some things if you do that.

Also, the first story arc in GEARLESS: An Untold Web Comic is almost finished over at gearless.untoldthegame.com . It's an all ages comics I've been writing as a media tie-in for the Untold card-based role playing game. It starts out a little silly, but fans of my darker stuff should find that things start to get really interesting by page twelve or so. D3rr0 is not quite what he appears to be and neither is BlackOps. Thank You,J.F. Lewis for taking the time,M.R.   

A Gritty Little Thriller...M.R reviews X

 X Review            

Overview;Holly Rowe's (Review;X is a success on many levels.  One is an expert use of contrast.  Holly is a seasoned prostitute Shay is just beginning.  The contrast of police and criminals is also used very effectively.  The cast is great, particularly the two female leads.  The greatest strength of X is its darkness.  Viva Bianca is an incredibly attractive lead, but his is not a sexy movie, it is sinister and disturbing.  The early sequences of Shay's first few tricks are awkward and cringe worthy.  Though the world is against Holly and Shay it is vital to note, they are never portrayed as victims, they are survivors in a harsh reality.  One standout scene involves a pimp smacking Holly, before she proceeds to thoroughly beat the shit out of him.  Director Writer Jon Hewitt keeps an incredible intensity through the bulk of the film's running time.  
In the end;The tightly paced script and direction by Jon Hewitt create a criminally under seen crime flick.  The cast is terrific and the plot hits all the right notes.  If you are looking for a crime film that does not glamorous sex and violence this is the film for you.  John Hewitt finds small human moments within the darkness and chase sequences creating a emotional resonance for his characters.    

Buy One book get a second Half Off

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Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving

The last Werewolf

Overview;
Jake is a suicidal werewolf, and may be the last of his species.  Despite the pleas of his only friend , Harley he has resigned himself to allowing the hunters to kill him at the next full moon.  But complications arise is his wait for oblivion.

"Then, because I knew she knew  me, and because I could kill everything in her before killing her, and because that was the trick that led to the peace that passeth understanding, and because the only way was to begin with the worst thing, I let it come down.  The flesh of her thigh opened with a spray of warm blood…."
Review; Glen Duncan's The Last Werewolf harkens back to the style of early Anne Rice.  The prose is rich, descriptive and fluid.  Yet in a departure from novels such as Interview with the Vampire a great deal occurs in the novel's mere 293 pages.  The plot rockets forward in a manner more akin to an excellent B movie thriller.  Conspiracies, kidnappings and double crosses abound.  Duncan's terrific writing feels above such simple trappings, and this is the novel's strength.  This is elegant B- horror, complete with all the sex and violence one would expect.  The character of Jake is fully realized and demonstrates the strength of Duncan's story and writing.  Jake is wholly unlikable and he is narrating the story.  Despite his snide comments and self serving actions the reader follows him willingly.  Make no mistake, Jake is not an anti-hero, or hero in any way.  Jake is a fully realized protagonist in a great story.  The end is fulfilling and marks a logical end to the story.  The only glaring weakness to the novel is a continuous stream of observations that the events are not playing out in a way typical to horror novels or movies.  I am unsure if this is meant to be a meta-gag or merely ironic.
In the End; This is a great book for a person incapable of stopping their mind, but in the mood for a simple thriller.  The firs person narrative adds an extra dimension to the proceedings. Duncan leaves no gaping plot holes, and does not resort to simplifying his ideas.  

M.R. interviews..........J.F. Gonzalez

Please welcome J.F. Gonzalez 

When writing Clickers with Mark Williams did you realize you would
write two sequels with Brian Keene? How did this all come to fruition?
No, of course not. I didn't know Brian then. Mark and I wrote Clickers between 1993 and 1996 and I didn't meet Brian until the 2000 World Horror Convention in Denver, when Clickers has already been out for seven months as an ebook and had just been released as a trade paperback (the first paperback release was launched at that convention). We had no intention on this book to become a series. It wasn't until 2005 when the book had attained somewhat of an underground cult status that I thought I would like to take a stab at a sequel. By then, Mark had passed away rather unexpectedly and I didn't want to do a sequel by myself out of respect for him. I needed a collaborator that I could mesh creatively with, the way Mark and I did, and Brian was the perfect choice. They never met, but the two of them had quite a lot in common, primarily a love for classic horror films and fiction, comic books, and heavy metal. Not only that, Brian had a love and appreciation for the kind of low budget cheesy kind of horror fiction Mark and I were paying homage to in Clickers - that was important.

What are some of the advantages to co-authoring a novel?
When it works, collaborations are wonderful. Having the extra set of eyes, of course, is a benefit, but when you have somebody as absorbed in the story as you are, it just gives you that added boost to the creative process. When you find a collaborator you can click with on every level of the story - narrative flow, plot, prose, structure, theme - it's quite a magical process.
Do you find it easier to write Supernatural Horror such as
Shapeshifter, and The Beloved or less fantastical works such as
Survivor?
Not really. The same amount of effort goes into writing each.

Of the characters you have created, which draws the strongest personal
connection for you? How so?
Hard to say, really. I remember when I was writing The Beloved; I channeled some personal angst and frustration into Elizabeth Weaver's character. I was going through the same thing she was at the time - somebody with a full-time job and a part-time job as a writer who was also trying to balance family life and the responsibilities of raising a child. Tim Gaines from Back From the Dead also drew a personal connection for me due to his love of horror novels. I was just like him as a kid.

What literary character had the most indelible impact on you? In what way?
That's even tougher. I can't really say. There's so many of them, for different reasons.
What was the first truly scary book you remember reading?
Again, hard to say about books (novels), but I can tell you what the first truly scary horror short story was I read. "Sweets to the Sweet" by Robert Bloch. I read it when I was ten years old, in an anthology of horror stories my mother gave me. Even then I was drawn to the scary stuff, and most of my reading up until that time was comic books and juveniles (Hardy Boys, The Three Investigators). Reading that Bloch story opened Pandora's Box for me. I haven't been the same ever since.
Do you have any projects coming down the pipeline you would like share with us?
Clickers vs. Zombies by Brian Keene and myself has just been turned in to Bloodletting Press for a 2012 release. I'm working on a short novel called The Killers with Wrath James White for Sinister Grin Press that we're both very excited about. I'm in the final stages of finishing a novella for Delirium Books called "Sins of the Father". Aside from that, there's a few screenplay projects and a novel I want to get back to, and the ambitious reprinting of my backlist in new digital and trade paperback formats. There will be some short stories down the pike too. I hardly write short stories these days, and for the first time in years I've started writing them again, mostly on spec, just for the love of doing it. 

Old NES Favorites

Anyone Remember this old game?

Drey's Library

Our editor Jay Hartman was just interviewed for Drey's Library's, click below

M.R. Interviews.............................................Scott M Baker

Tell us about Rotter World?
Rotter World is my first zombie novel.  It's being published by Permuted Press, and should be released early in 2012.  It takes place in the months after vampires released the Zombie Virus against mankind, hoping to eliminate humans.  Instead, the vampires badly miscalculated, and the rotters preyed on the flesh of the undead as well as the living.  In order to survive, a small band of humans and vampires entered an uneasy truce and managed to sit out the apocalypse from an isolated location on the coast of southern Maine.  The survivors established a relatively comfortable existence until Dr. Robert Compton, a government scientist, arrives at camp claiming to have discovered a vaccine for the Zombie Virus.  The catch: it's located in his underground laboratory at Site R in southern Pennsylvania, hundreds of miles deep inside rotter territory.  The trek across a rotter-ravaged countryside forces the group to confront external dangers (and internal demons) that none of them could have imagined.  Yet what awaits them at Site R is far more threatening.
What separates The Vampire Hunters trilogy from the plethora of vampire novels coming out now?
Two things make my vampires stand out.  First, mine hark back to the classic monsters of Universal and Hammer Studios as portrayed by Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee.  The vampires in my trilogy are pure evil.  They don't date teenage girls or spend a life regretting the sins they committed.  I vision vampires as embracing their lack of inhibitions and reveling in their inhumanity, so that's how I portray them.  They enjoy tormenting their prey and satiating their desires, whether it's for sex or blood, with an indiscriminate savagery.  My vampires never suffer pangs of conscience. 

Second, unlike many books or movies where the vampires are portrayed as two dimensional characters, I give mine personalities and explain the motivations that drive them.  Walker, Chiang Shih's consigliore, willingly became a vampire to get revenge on his master.  Melinda, who is twelve-years-old, was turned by a vampire with a penchant for child molestation, and now hunts other children and pedophiles.  There are back stories for each of my vampires and reasons why they behave the way they do, which I detail throughout the trilogy.  My goal is to make the vampires central characters to the books just as much as the hunters, and to be the villains you love to hate.
What are the advantages to crafting a trilogy as opposed to a single novel?
You get to tell your story in much greater depth.  I never intended The Vampire Hunters to be a trilogy.  By the time I completed the first book, I found myself wanting to further explore the vampire mythos I had created because there were back stories about Chiang Shih and the Vampyrnomicon that begged to be told.  So I came up with the concept of the hunters finding themselves at the center of a war between humans and vampires for dominion over the world, developed a few new characters and subplots, and wrote the second and third books. 
What is the process you use when crafting your tales?
I start the writing process by spending a couple of weeks plotting out the novel and developing my characters, jotting down each scene on 3x5 cards which I then organize into a storyline.  The cards are effective not only because I can take notes for each scene (dialogue, descriptions, research notes etc.), but it also gives me the opportunity to reorder scenes without having to redo the outline.  Once I have a basic plot outlined, I begin drafting the novel.  I try to write for at least an hour every day.  (My favorite location is on my back deck with a cigar and a glass of iced coffee because outside there are no distractions.)  I forge ahead and get my thoughts onto paper, and worry about the wordsmithing later.  Unless I get a great idea that would substantively improve a scene, I never go back and edit until the first draft of the manuscript is complete because it disrupts the flow.  I do all my revising after the first draft is completed.
What is your favorite character that you created?  Do you love or hate him/her?
Jack, the alcoholic mall Santa from my short story "Deck the Malls with Bowels of Holly."  He's a down-on-his-luck Iraq war vet who finds himself at ground zero of a zombie apocalypse when the sickly reindeer at the mall's Santa's Village display drop dead and come back as the living dead.  Rather than run for exit, Jack grabs the only weapons he has at his disposal (including a metal candy cane) and wades into the fray.  When I wrote the story, I pictured Bruce Campbell playing Jack if Hollywood ever turned it into a movie.  (M.R.'s note as a HUGE Campbell fan this sounds fucking awesome)
Which do you find scarier zombies, or vampires?
Zombies are scarier.  Vampires are too much like us to be truly frightening.  They can think and rationalize and communicate, which gives them some semblance of humanity.  In traditional literature, vampires travel singly or in small groups, and that makes them manageable as an enemy.  Are they dangerous?  Yes.  Are they scary?  No.  (Except for the vampires from 30 Days of Night, who were scary as hell.)
Zombies, however, are driven by nothing more than an instinctual desire to feed.  They don't retain any of their emotions or remnants if their humanity.  Unlike vampires, zombies usually travel in hordes.  A zombie apocalypse is like an uncontrollable force of nature, a living dead tsunami consuming everything in its path. 
What is the difference in your process between writing short stories and a novel or saga?
The writing process is pretty much the same, except that with short stories the time spent on research and plotting is much less.  Sometimes it's a challenge to set up a scene and develop a character in a few pages, but when I get it right, the end result is worth it. 
What are your future writing aspirations?
I just finished a short story ("Recognition") that is told from the point of view of a recently-reanimated zombie, which I am currently trying to place, and am putting the final touches on Yeitso, a novel about something evil terrorizing the desert around Los Alamos, New Mexico, which is my homage to the 1950s monster movies I loved as a kid.  I'm doing the research for a series of young adult novels I hope to begin writing early next year.  The setting of this series is a futuristic, post-apocalyptic world where the boundaries between earth and Hell have broken down, allowing the two realms to merge.   In addition to those, I also have sitting on the mental back burner an idea for a novel about a group of OSS officers trying to stop the Nazis from concluding a pact with Satan in the closing days of World War II as well as a short story about the Confederates using zombies in Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg.
What writer most influenced you as an author?  How? 
There are two.  The first is Graham Masterton.  My mother bought me The Manitou as a Christmas gift when I was about ten.  It was the first modern horror novel I ever read.  An ancient Native American medicine man being reborn on the back of a young woman to destroy the white man; a male nurse turned inside out during its emergence; blood-lusting creatures summoned from hell; an elevator full of slaughtered policemen.  The novel made quite an impression on me, and after that I was hooked on the genre.  Graham is still one of my favorite authors.The second influence is Joss Whedon.  I'm a huge fan of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, and I always loved the way Joss could take the most intense scenes and intersperse them with humorous elements, and still make them work.  I try to work that same type of light-hearted relief into The Vampire Hunters trilogy. 
What is the most influential literary character to you personally?  Why?
Van Helsing as played by Peter Cushing.  I don't know what it was about that character that appealed to me.  Maybe because Van Helsing was the first monster hunter in modern horror.  Or maybe the way Cushing played him with that quiet intensity and cold rationality.  In either case, I loved that character as a kid, both in the book and in the movies.  So it was only natural that when I was looking for my own theme to write about, I would focus in on vampire hunters.
If you could take the reins of writing for any existing franchise, which would you choose and why?
Famous Monsters of Filmland.  That was my favorite magazine growing up as a Monster Kid, and was one of the most formative influences for where I am today.  I was psyched when they reissued the magazine last year, and was even more ecstatic when they gave The Vampire Hunters a fantastic review.  To be able to be involved in that publication would be awesome.