Carl Alves's Blog, page 32

The Story Behind My Story: Survivors

The basis of my story Survivors is an urban legend. The urban legend is kids at a supermarket, helping unsuspecting people, usually older or elderly, by packing their goods into the car. While they are helping the older folks pack the items into their car, one of them slips into the car and is unknowingly taken home by them. When they unpack their items, the person who snuck in the car then surprises them and robs them at knife or gunpoint. It’s an interesting urban legend that I thought I could work with and put a story together revolving around this concept. Except I wanted to put a twist into this urban legend. What if the real monsters in this story aren’t the kids who are trying to rob the old people, but the old folks themselves?



To make this story work I tried to make the kids as sympathetic as possible. In my story, they’re homeless kids who have formed their own sort of family. They help each other, look after each other. Even though what they intend on doing is pretty bad, I think it’s not hard to empathize with them. The old folks, on the other hand, are the worst kind of monsters. Not the scary, supernatural type but human monsters with absolutely despicable intent. You can buy a copy of the anthology on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Crossroads-Dark....

10 Questions with Kealan Patrick Burke

1. What is the most unusual job you’ve ever held?



I was a mapmaker for about a week. Not a cartographer, mind you. My responsibilities were to place power cables where the civil authority dictated they should go on ordinance survey maps. Try as I might I couldn’t get the hang of it, and my employment ended when I accidentally ran an extremely high voltage cable through a graveyard.



2. Who has been your biggest influence as a writer?



It sounds like such a clichéd answer at this stage, which I think just speaks to the power and longevity of his influence, but Stephen King. There are others, of course, but King is King. Without his influence, I wouldn’t be writing today.



3. When you wrote The Turtle Boy, did you intend for it to become a series or did that evolve later?



The Turtle Boy was written to be a standalone novella. In fact, earlier drafts of the book have a much different and more conclusive ending. It wasn’t until Rich Chizmar at Cemetery Dance contacted me asking me if I had a story they could publish for their novella line that I realized there were more stories to tell in Timmy’s world. This led to The Hides, but in order for that book to work, The Turtle Boy needed to be a little more open-ended. From there, the series opened up and a mythology developed that begged further exploration.



4. Who is your favorite writer?



An impossible question to answer, and I don’t have just one, but off the top of my head: Stephen King, Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell, Charles L. Grant, Michael Marshall (Smith), Dennis Lehane, Cormac McCarthy, Ken Bruen, Larry McMurtry, Christopher Fowler, Gillian Flynn, Graham Joyce, John Connolly, Robert R. McCammon, and Scott Smith.



5. How did you get involved in designing covers for print and digital books?



Economic necessity more than anything. Once I started reprinting my books for the digital market, it wasn’t financially viable for me to pay $300-$400 per cover when I was putting upwards of a dozen titles online, so I designed my own. Once the books were out there, other writers starting asking who my designer was and once they realized I was doing my own covers, they asked if I would do theirs. It started out as a bit of fun, but in the two years since, it’s become a fully-fledged business.



6. Is there an overall theme to your writing?



If there is, I’m not really conscious of it, but in thinking back over what I’ve written, I suppose I tend to gravitate toward themes of loss, grief, madness, and identity.



7. What was your acting experience like in the movie Slime City Massacre?



It was a blast! I had no idea what I was getting myself into, but the few weeks I spent on the set and the friends I made there are something I’ll never forget. It was wonderful! Plus, I got to cross a few things off my bucket list, like being in a movie, and getting to play a monster in a horror film.



8. What made you start writing?



My mother was an avid reader, and horror fan, so I was exposed to horror books and movies from a very early age. Plus I come from a background of storytellers, so I think a combination of those things made it inevitable that I would become a writer.



9. What is your best quality as a writer?



I have absolutely no idea. If I did, I’d probably be a lot better at marketing my work. I suppose if I have to answer, I’d say tenacity, stubbornness, a refusal to give up, and a desire to always be better at what I do.



10. If Hollywood was making a film adaptation of The Turtle Boy, and the director asked you to cast the role of Timmy Quinn, who would you choose?



Considering Timmy’s eleven years of age in the first book, and I’m absolutely unfamiliar with child actors, this is impossible to answer. But as he gets older, I could see someone like Tye Sheridan (Scouts versus Zombies, Joe, Mud) in the role.

The Turtle Boy by Kealan Patrick Burke

In The Turtle Boy, eleven-year-old Timmy Quinn is beginning his summer vacation in small town Ohio, where he is struggling with finding things to do. Everything for him changes, when he and his best friend, Pete, find a strange boy at Myers Pond, whose ankle is badly mangled and claims he is feeding the turtles. This image haunts Timmy and he can’t shake it. It also so infuriates Pete’s dad that he forbids his son to play with Timmy and sends his son to summer camp. Timmy befriends Kim and together they explore the pond, only to be intercepted by Pete’s dad, who has a shadowed past involving the Turtle Boy.



Much of what I like about this novel involved the mood and atmosphere that the author created in this story. There is a strong sense of foreboding and unreality in the novel, as well as an intriguing mystery. The story is well-developed and gripping from beginning to end. Although I thought overall the characterization was strong, Timmy did read younger than his age of eleven. He struck me more as a boy of eight or nine. The story finishes with an explosive conclusion, one that involves Timmy’s dad and his shadowy past with the Turtle Boy. This was an enjoyable novel that fans of horror and mystery will want to read.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a titanic, worldwide force that will almost certainly break the all-time global box office records—adjusted for inflation of course; otherwise nothing could touch Gone with the Wind. I had heard so many good, non-spoilery things about the movie and it was well-reviewed, so my expectations were high. I was expecting a sci-fi classic. So did the movie deliver?



For the most part it did. The movie was very enjoyable. There was a nice blend of old and new characters. It was a wise idea to bring in the old characters for nostalgic purposes before giving way to the new characters who will carry the series forward. It was great to see Han Solo back on the screen—with far more screen time than I thought I would see from him in this movie—and Harrison Ford certainly hasn’t lost his touch, delivering the snarky, rebellious character the way he should. For the most part, I like the new characters as well, with one very glaring exception. Both the character and the actor who plays Finn were absolutely terrible. I was cool with the idea of making a stormtrooper a main character since they have always been these mindless soldiers, but both the character and actor were all wrong. The character was a raging yahoo who just doesn’t fit the movie or the series. At one point, Han Solo tells him to tone it down, a sentiment I agreed with as I watched the movie. He was also constantly breathing hard and trying to catch his breath, even when it didn’t fit the scene. Rey, Poe, and Kylo Ren were much better developed, although Ren had some serious anger management issues not becoming of a Sith.



The action was great. The plot was very enjoyable. There were definitely many aspects of this movie which were taken from the original, which some may consider to be a rip-off, but I enjoyed it. I anticipated the major character death that occurred in the movie and wished they had taken Finn instead, since I’m not looking forward to having to watch him for two more movies. The climax was well done with the exception of the light saber fight between Rey and Kylo Ren that wasn’t remotely believable considering that only a few hours earlier, she didn’t even realize she had Jedi powers. Ultimately, this was a good, fun movie but it did not meet the lofty expectations I put on it.

10 Questions with Weston Ochse

1. If we were to have an apocalypse, what do you think would be the cause of the apocalypse?


GMOs. Genetically modified organisms. I’m in fear that soon all the seeds on our lonely will be by subscription only. Did you know what companies are selling and using seeds as you read this that will only produce for one year? In order to get the next year produced, you have to pay more money. Soon we won’t have natural fruits and veggies and wheat that just grow again the next year. Gone will be subsistence living and farming. And oh yeah, in a related thought, colony collapse disorder. That!



2. What’s the greatest moment in your writing career?



It’s funny. I keep having those. My first published story. My first story in this or that magazine or that anthology. My first novel. My second novel. They great moments keep coming. It’s why I continue to write.



3. How has your experience in the military influenced you as a writer?



I think it helped me get through the beginning stages. I’m a grunt at heart. We’re told to take hills. So I saw each obstacle as a hill to be conquered. Then later, when writing military fiction, it helped me considerably provide realism that most writers can’t achieve.



4. Who is your favorite writer?



I have no favorite favorite, but let me share my top three (not in any order) and explain why.



Cormac Mccarthy. Besides the fact that I’m envious because he can get away without any of the usual punctuation, there is no one out there writing with such power about the relationship and constant battle man (humankind) has against nature, be it the nature of self, the physical nature of the universe, or the nature of an idea. He is a master of it. Perhaps my favorite part of any text in any book, other than the section below, is from the last thousand words of the second book of his Plains series called The Crossing. The pang and loss the main character feels as well as his inability to do anything about it is so stark and powerful, the passage left me breathless.



But not everyone is ready for Macarthy. The move The Counselor directed by starring Cameron Diaz and Michael Fastbender wasn’t a hit. I personally think that the movie is magnificent. It’s pure Mccarthy. But what viewers want is a happy ending. They want to see a happy character arc. But as I mentioned, Mccarthy is the master of man versus nature and in the movie man comes up against the intractability of nature. Realize, with nature, you can’t argue with it, you can’t fight against it, it’s there.



One last thought on Mccarthy. I had never read any of his work prior to 2000. The reason I picked him up was because the New York Times came up with a list of the top fifty books of the last fifty years of the twentieth century. Blood Meridian by Cormac Mccarthy was number one. Based on that, I had to read it. Talk about a powerful book about man versus nature… Blood Meridian will scour your heart and make you weep.



Ray Bradbury. Probably the reason I started writing. He was (and is) such a fabulist. I never knew there were horror writers or sci fi writers or fantasy writers. I thought everyone were fabulist writers and non-fabulist writers. When I first read The Sound of Summer Running (the story from which Dandelion Wine was created) in my school textbook, I was hooked. Brdbury’s ability to generate wonder in the reader as well as the characters is still unmatched to this day. Something Wicked This Way Comes is equally amazing in its ability to curate dread.



Let me show you. Here’s an excerpt from that story I mentioned above and you can see how he turned the love of a new pair of tennis shoes into summer:



It was June and long past time for buying the special shoes that were quiet as a summer rain falling on the walks. June and the earth full of raw power and everything everywhere in motion. The grass was still pouring in from the country, surrounding the sidewalks, stranding the houses. Any moment the town would capsize, go down and leave not a stir in the clover and weeds. And here Douglas stood, trapped on the dead cement and the red-brick streets, hardly able to move.



“Dad!” He blurted it out. “Back there in that window, those Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Shoes . . .”



His father didn’t even turn. “Suppose you tell me why you need a new pair of sneakers. Can you do that?”



“Well . . .”



It was because they felt the way it feels every summer when you take off your shoes for the first time and run in the grass. They felt like it feels sticking your feet out of the hot covers in wintertime to let the cold wind from the open window blow on them suddenly and you let them stay out a long time until you pull them back in under the covers again to feel them, like packed snow. The tennis shoes felt like it always feels the first time every year wading in the slow waters of the creek and seeing your feet below, half an inch further downstream, with refraction than the real part of you above water.



“Dad,” said Douglas, “it’s hard to explain.”



Somehow the people who made tennis shoes knew what boys needed and wanted.

They put marshmallows and coiled springs in the soles and they wove the rest out of grasses bleached and fired in the wilderness. Somewhere deep in the soft loam of the shoes the thin hard sinews of the buck deer were hidden. The people that made the shoes must have watched a lot of winds blow the trees and a lot of rivers going down to the lakes. Whatever it was, it was in the shoes, and it was summer.



Then there’s Robert Heinlein. He was the first sci fi author I know to write about PTSD. You’d think it would have been in Starship Troopers, but it wasn’t. No one suffers from what they did in Starship Troopers and I think people were critical of that. Heinlein sat out to change that in Glory Road, which was also the first book I can think of written about Vietnam, although it never refers to it other than a war in Southeast Asia. From his earliest work all the way to Job: A Comedy of Justice, Heinlein’s literary through line held fast to the theme of social consciousness. He’s been called a libertine and an iconoclast, but there are few authors in our history who have touched on such a broad ranging group of social subjects and have made us think about them, even if we can’t always grok them.

Did you know that Heinlein came up with the idea of ‘Paying it Forward’ in his 1951 book, Between Planets. As a mentor to Ray Bradbury, he passed this idea onto him, which you can see in Bradbury’s book Dandelion Wine (see above).

Check this out:

How do I thank Mr. Jonas, he wondered, for what he's done? How do I thank him, how pay him back? No way, no way at all. You just can't pay. What then? What? Pass it on somehow, he thought, pass it on to someone else. Keep the chain moving. Look around, find someone, and pass it on. That was the only way....

5. Can you describe how it came about that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson signed on to star and executive produce a movie based on your SEAL Team 666 novel, and can you provide an update on the status of that project?


I’m honestly not sure how it happened. All I know is that I got a text from my editor at Thomas Dunne Books moments after I was released from 5 hours of secondary detention at Dubai International Airport saying The Rock is going to star in your movie and don’t tell anyone. Talk about instantaneous disbelief and thankfulness. However it happened, it was because of the hard work of Brendan Deneen. And the status? It’s still a go. Just waiting for Mr. Johnson to stop destroying California so he can be a bad-ass US Navy SEAL fighting supernatural monstas!!!



6. What advice do you have for beginning writers?



Define what kind of writer you want to be and then be that. What’s that mean? If you want instant gratification, then self-publish. If you want a long professional career, then be prepared for years of heart ache before you get that big break. Those years are necessary. There’s a professional standard we need to attain. If writing is a muscle, we need to spend time making it strong. But realize, once you get that break, a whole universe is then open to you that is only open to less than one percent of self-published authors.



7. Which medium do you prefer writing: short stories, non-fiction, graphic novels, or novels?



I really love the short story the best. Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants is the best short story ever written and I’m constantly trying to achieve that clarity of metaphor.



8. In Blaze of Glory, what made you decide to use the maggot creatures that you use to spell the doom of humanity?



I wanted to use something that people could recognize, something that people have already seen and have been grossed out by, then turn it up to eleven.



9. What is your best quality as a writer?



Gosh. I can’t answer that. This is something for you or fans to answer. I’m just a writer.



10. If Hollywood was making a film adaptation of Blaze of Glory, and the director asked you to cast the role of Buckly Adamski, who would you choose?



Well, it was almost Wesley Snipes. Yeah. You heard it. That was real right up until the moment I screwed it up. To hear the whole story, read the essay in the back of Blaze. But the movie would call for a strong African American actor. I’ve always been partial to Courtney B. Vance. Then again, Michael Boatman would do an awesome job as Buckley as would Chi McBride.



And oh yeah, my favorite part of writing Blaze of Glory was the crack-addled grandmother who turned nursery rhymes into precognition. Yeah. That.

Blaze of Glory by Weston Ochse

Weston Ochse offers up a new kind of apocalypse in Blaze of Glory. Unlike the usual zombies or natural disaster, the downfall of humanity is the result of little critters that resemble maggots, along with their cousins that are the size of Cadillacs and destroy everything in their path. The little guys burrow into people and multiply, eventually killing their human host. Their weakness? Salt. It’s a good thing we have oceans, something that our survivors, located in North Carolina, come to realize just might be the path of their salvation. Buckley and the others are holed up in a restaurant, but realize they are facing a losing battle against the maggots. This leads to a mad dash to the nearby ocean, which seems like a million miles away as they have to get through both the little and the big critters.

Blaze of Glory is a fun, fast-paced novel. The grim scenario is painted out well and the atmosphere created really fits the story. Although I have a general fatigue with end of the world type novels, since I seem to be reading many of them lately, this was a different type of disaster and a more localized scenario without an extensive story about the survival of a group, and instead fixating on accomplishing one singular goal. I liked the focus of the novel. The characters were a bit rough around the edges and not always likeable, but remained intent on accomplishing their goals. This was an enjoyable novel that I would recommend reading.

10 Questions with Dacre Stoker

1. What made you want to write a sequel to Bram Stoker’s Dracula?


I had read Dracula when I was a college student in the late 1970’s, but it was not until Ian Holt contacted me in 2004 with the idea of collaborating on a sequel that I had thought about it. I was not a writer so was rather intimidated by the process, however I approached it like anything else I do, break it up in to small pieces that were doable and put the pieces together. I liked the idea of simply continuing the story that my great grand uncle Bram left behind, the term sequel was attached later.



2. What’s the greatest moment in your writing career?



I have to admit when the first box of copies of the Un-Dead arrived at my front door, that was the best!



3. Can you describe the writing process between yourself and Ian Holt, and how did you two link up for Dracula the Un-dead?



Ian had the idea from a screenplay of his to give Count Dracula a chance to represent his side of the story. By 2004 we felt that most Dracula fans identified with the Dracula character as a vampire version of the historic Vlad Dracula lll as he has been depicted in most movies. So we decided to continue Bram’s work but to develop all of the surviving (Dracula) characters so the reader could actually learn much more about them; where did they come from, how they knew each other, some of their personal issues. We obviously did the same with Count Dracula, we did not set out to make him good, we want to give him a backstory and fill in details of what Vlad the Impaler would be like if he was a vampire. It took us a while to settle on the final outline for the story. Ian had a basic premise that served as the backbone of the story, so everything stemmed from there. We constantly bounced ideas off of each other as we wrote our separate parts of the story. Our historic researcher Alex Galant provided plenty of good information about locations for us to consider and to work with. I did a lot of research into Bram’s writing of Dracula as well as finding out a lot of information about Bram’s personal life. This helped tremendously as I was able to contribute by writing sections of the book pertaining to Bram Stoker and Detective Cotford, a character who Bram originally slated to appear in Dracula.



4. What made you start writing?



Dracula the Un-Dead was my first serious effort.



5. Do you feel a responsibility for the legacy of Bram Stoker?


In a sense I do as scholars and pop culture fans alike have really only taken notice of Bram in the past 20 years. He died in 1912, so there is no one alive who ever met him and very few still living who remember meeting his son. So it is up to the present generation of Stokers to keep the focus on this interesting man, I take this role seriously.



6. You’ve spent a good deal of time in Romania. What’s it like going back to the home of the man who inspired the character of Dracula, and how have you been received in Romania?



I was very apprehensive going to Romania for the first time as I thought I would receive a cool reception. After all I had read for the past 5-6 years how fed up the Romanians were with the Dracula image looming over them; they have had tourists coming over with the pre conceived notions that Transylvania was full of bats and vampires and otherwise not to be taken seriously. Furthermore it was Bram Stoker who borrowed the name Dracula from Romania history for his Count character, essentially he turned a national hero into a pop culture icon. I can honestly say there are no grudges; most people whom I have met were pleased that I am on a mission to set the record straight about Vlad Dracula lll and assist them in encouraging responsible vampire tourism. Romania has very lovely parts, beautifully preserved and restored castles, churches and villages, a must see even if you are not a vampire buff.



7. Out of all of the film adaptations of Dracula, which do you think is the best?



I liked the original 1931 Todd Browning Dracula with Bela Lugosi, and I also really liked the 1992 Coppola version.



8. Who is the best actor ever to take the role of Dracula?



I just can’t narrow it down to one so I must provide my top 3 as so much has to do with advances in filmmaking, which contribute to the actors’ effectiveness. In no particular order: Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee and Gary Oldman.



9. What made you and Ian decide to start Dracula the Un-dead 25 years after the original novel leaves off?


We wanted the central character to be Quincey, the child born at the end of Dracula, so he needed to be old enough to carry the story. In addition, the dates needed to be adjusted just a bit to fit in the real fire at the Lyceum Theater, Bram Stoker’s last few months and the sailing of the Titanic.



10. In Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula is more of a villain, but in your novel, he is a dark hero. What made you change the direction of the character?



In Dracula the Un-dead he is still a bloodthirsty killer, but he starts to show his emotions, in a similar fashion that Anne Rice attached displays of emotions from her vampires in the popular Vampire Chronicles series. We believed that readers expected a well rounded vampire creature, as opposed to a zombie like killing machine.

10 Questions with Ian Holt

1. How did it come about you and Dacre Stoker writing a sequel to Bram Stoker’s Dracula?

When I graduated NYU, I was working on a screenplay about the historical Dracula based on the 1973 non-fiction best-seller by Prof. Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally, In Search Of Dracula. I wound up traveling around the world with the professors’ lecture tour and even went to visit Transylvania in Romania and spent the night in the ruins of the historical Dracula’s Castle in Poenari. The professors became my mentors and I became, as they called me, a “Dracula Historian.” I soon found myself giving lectures on both the historical and fictional vampire Dracula and their influence on our society and culture around the world.

I was asked to speak at Dracula ’95 in LA, the 100tth anniversary of the release of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I was standing in the bookstore and saw at least 50 sequels to Dracula and none of them were successful or had any connection to the Stoker family. I had the idea. I knew that Bram’s widow had a hand in crafting the 1931 Bela Lugosi Dracula film and that she was frozen out by the studio when it came to the failed sequel. I started to wonder what the Stoker family had in mind for continuing Dracula’s story.

Years later, through a mutual friend, Prof. Elizabeth Miller (a Bram Stoker historian), I was introduced to Dacre Stoker, Bram’s great grand nephew. Since I am a filmmaker, I approached Dacre about writing a screenplay together. Dacre suggested that to honor his ancestor, Bram, we write a novel instead. We began researching and speaking to elder Stoker family members. It was like two police detectives piecing together clues to a century old cold case. Eventually, we discovered Bram left behind many hints on characters and even his actual handwritten notes on story threads that never appeared in the original novel. Dacre and I did our best to fill in the gaps and came up with the story. It was almost like we were writing it with Bram.

Thus, began an exhaustive almost three-year book writing and historical research process that ended with the publishing of, Dracula, The Un-Dead.



2. Who has been your biggest influence as a writer?


Here’s where I get into trouble with literary purists. I ask everyone to remember I am a screenwriter first and foremost.

My biggest writing influence is screenwriter, Shane Black. I have always loved genre films and novels: horror, sci-fi and action. Up until Shane wrote Lethal Weapon all character and story development ended with the beginning of the action scene. What Shane did for me that was so revolutionary and groundbreaking was allowing the characters and story to develop in the midst of the action. This made for a much more exciting screenplay read and ultimately, highly enjoyable films.

I tried to bring this bubbling cauldron mixture of action, character and story developing all at once (along with the horror) to writing Dracula, The Un-Dead.


3. Can you describe the writing process between yourself and Dacre Stoker when you wrote Dracula the Un-dead?

Dacre was in South Carolina and I was in New York for most of the years we spent writing. Once we finished all our initial research and settled on the story, we started by exhaustingly discussing and then outlining and finally bullet-pointing every scene and chapter. That became our road map. Then, we broke the story up into character threads and chapters that went together and split up the writing duties.

We talked constantly on the phone as we wrote separately over the next couple of years.

When we each did our historical and period research and finished our threads/chapters, we switched and re-wrote each other’s work.

For the final push, we hooked up face to face again over a few weeks, merged the threads, smoothed the rough edges and pushed out a first draft together.

As I write it, this sounds a lot simpler than the climbing of Everest it actually was. Trust me.



4. What current writing projects are you working on?


I am proud to announce the formation of my new genre film production company, Alt House Productions, with producers, Michael Kuciak (Freezer, Blood Shy, Killer Party) and Michael Alden (The Hours, Just Cause, Kissing Jessica Stein).

We are currently in pre-production on our first feature, a supernatural thriller, Unhinged, which I wrote and will shoot early next year. Unhinged is co-produced by Archstone Pictures and will be distributed worldwide by Archstone Distribution.

We’re also getting ready to shoot our first feature documentary, From Roosevelt To Reagan: The Rise Of Public Enemy – the never before revealed true story of the formative years of music superstars Chuck D and The Bomb Squad's Keith Shocklee, founding members of the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame rap group, Public Enemy.


5. Was it a daunting task to write a sequel to one of the most well-known horror novels ever written?

Extremely daunting! That’s because Dracula fans are broken into many factions. First, those that love the original novel. Second, those that haven’t read the novel and only know the movies. Third, those that love the novel and the movies. Fourth, those that disregard the novel and movies and are only concerned about the real-life, historical Dracula. And, even these factions can be broken down into subsets like those that like the more sexual, scary and violent vampires as opposed to those that like the tamer more Twilight-like vampires or as I call them, veggie-vamps.

As George Lucas said when writing the prequels to his own Star Wars trilogy, the biggest hurdle is that the millions upon millions who have seen, or in our case, read the original has in their imagination their own ideas for what should happen in any continuation of the story.

The daunting part of writing Dracula, The Un-Dead was trying to hit that sweet spot that would give all Dracula/vampire loving fan factions and subsets something we hoped they would enjoy.

What pleases me most is the overwhelmingly positive reaction from the fans who made the novel such an amazingly popular success around the world.



6. Is there any subject that is off limits for you as a writer?

Considering I’ve been working on a horror screenplay based upon a true story about the ultimate taboo, necrophilia… I would say no. There is no subject off limits to me as a writer. All I care about is if the characters are interesting and the story is compelling.

I mean who would have thought a horror movie about a flesh eating virus (Cabin Fever) or a demented scientist that wants to stitch people together into a human centipede (The Human Centipede) would be huge hits?

A writer, and a horror writer especially, should have only one mantra: NO FEAR!


7. Out of all of the film adaptations of Dracula, which do you think is the best?

This one is complicated. The one thing that always bothered me about Bram’s Dracula novel is the outdated belief that evil must fall just by good people opposing it. If only that were really true. Dracula is supposed to be so powerful and evil, yet he really doesn’t put up much of a fight at the end. Dacre and I believe Bram thought this too, but was hamstrung by the niceties of the time. That could be why the publisher and Bram changed the definitive ending of the early draft of the novel and left the door open to a sequel.

So, that is just a long-winded way of me saying that my own personal favorite Dracula film, although flawed, is the 1979 Frank Langella version. In that film, Dracula puts up a good fight and even kills Van Helsing. Dracula’s as scary, dangerous and powerful as he’s set up to be. Can you tell I always root for Dracula?

But, if you’re asking me what is the best film version of Bram’s novel, I have to say hands down is the BBC 1977 mini-series version, Count Dracula, starring Louis Jourdan. It is the only filmed version that includes the complete text of Bram’s novel pretty much as written. I highly recommend it if you haven’t seen it.


8. What has your experience been like writing and producing “Episode 50”?

Although I am very proud of Episode 50 and it was a huge international success that has opened many doors for me financially and professionally, I have to say that so far none of the films I wrote wound up on screen anything close to what I originally intended.

That is the biggest experience from Episode 50. I had to learn that even as a writer/producer, you might have more say than just as the lowly writer, but the truth is: he who controls the money controls what ultimately ends up on screen.

That was what I loved most about writing Dracula, The Un-Dead. With a novel the writers are in total control. The story Dacre and I intended to tell is exactly what wound up on the page.

This is why I decided to go into business for myself with my partners at Alt House Productions and finance our own films. No matter what happens from here on out, as Dracula might say, “It must be better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.”



9. What has drawn you to the character Dracula?

In some form or another, everyone at some point in their life wishes they were Dracula. It was no different for me. You like a girl, just give her a little bit of that Bela Lugosi wrist and finger action, hypnotize her and she’s yours. No awkward first dates or fear of rejection. Some big kid messes with you, Dracula has the strength of twenty men – the bully is dead meat. Before you can drive, Dracula can turn into a bat and fly off whenever and wherever he wants. No more waiting for busses or your parents to drive you. Why go to school or work if you’re Dracula? If you need money, just rob a bank. No prison can hold him. Just turn to mist and slither away through the bars.

Like the poster for the movie The Lost Boys says, “Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It’s fun to be a vampire.”

10. What form of writing do you prefer, writing novels or screen plays?

I have a photographic memory. So, while most novelists I would guess see words, I see images or the story playing out like a movie in my brain. It’s the same way Beethoven is said to have seen his music. That’s why many people consider Beethoven the first film score or soundtrack artist. This was documented really well in the excellent film about Beethoven’s life, Immortal Beloved.

It’s naturally harder for me to interpret the images I see into a novel, than to describe the images I see in a screenplay. Therefore, I have to say I enjoy writing screenplays much more than writing novels.

Dracula the Udead by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt

I’m always a little wary when people try to mess with a classic, even moreso when the novel is a direct sequel to it. However, the fact that it is written by Bram Stoker’s great-grandnephew and a Dracula historian lend it a great deal of credibility. The novel is set in 1912, a quarter of a century after Van Helsing and his “band of heroes” defeated Dracula. Front and center in this novel is Quincey Harker, the son of Mina and Jonathan Harker. His parents have kept him in the dark regarding their family history as it pertains to Dracula. When members of the band of heroes start to die off, Mina, who has not aged in the past twenty-five years, realizes that she has to reveal the family history to her son, who has turned away from the career of a lawyer that his father has plotted for him and aspires to be an actor under the tutelage of the great Basarab (who isn’t exactly who he seems to be). The true villain in the novel is revealed not to be Dracula but Countess Bathory, a sixteenth century vampire related to Dracula who is wreaking her revenge on God and humanity. Jonathan and the remaining heroes must once again face the evil that exists, but don’t necessarily know who the villains are.



This was a really enjoyable novel in a lot of ways. It helped that the characters were familiar, with the exception of Jonathan. The novel is exceptionally well-written and professional. There is a logical flow to the progression from the original novel to the sequel. The plot itself was very strong. Having said that, I found a couple of the things that were implemented in here a bit jarring, such as the appearance of Bram Stoker as a character (although this was sufficiently explained) and the transformation of Van Helsing’s character. I liked the inclusion of real-life historical figures into the novel and how they incorporated events like the Jack the Ripper murders into the story. The part with the Titanic at the end was a bit much for me, but for the most part this was well-handled. This novel was definitely a worthy successor to the original, one that I’m sure Bram Stoker would be proud of.

The Rookie by Scott Sigler

Scott Sigler put together a cool, innovative novel in The Rookie that combines elements of science fiction as well as football—a great combination of two things that I thoroughly enjoy but haven’t seen mixed together. Set about seven centuries from now, Quentin Barnes is a young human quarterback, coming from the Purist Nation, a planet of religious zealots. He gets signed by the Krakens of the Galactic Football League. A tier 2 league, this is a big step up for Barnes, but still not the highest level. The Krakens are hell bent on winning their championship, so that they could advance to Tier 1. The Galactic Football League features humans and aliens alike. The players’ uniforms are a variation of armor. The players are far faster, stronger, and more agile than any player in the NFL could dream of being.



I thought this was a cool concept, but I wasn’t sure how well it would actually turn out. There shouldn’t be any doubt that it will be great in Scott Sigler’s capable hands. I’m not sure how well this would work for someone who wasn’t an American football fan, but I imagine they would still enjoy it. There is great character development with Quentin and some of his teammates. Sigler incorporates the backstory well of the history of the worlds involved without it ever crowding into the actual story. The football descriptions are very well done. There are some good plot twists and complications in the story line, including one of the players throwing games, corruption with criminal elements, and racism (of the alien variety). Scott blends these elements well, and the end result was a satisfying novel.