Winter 2007 (20 page)

SP:
Both
Creepers
and
Scavenger
feature action told in “real time” –
what additional challenges does this method present to you as a writer?

DM:
Creepers
is told
in strict real time. The action of the book takes eight hours, and the book
takes eight hours to read out loud (as exemplified by the Brilliance unabridged
audio). There aren’t any cuts, summaries, or leaps forward, as in “Five minutes
later, he reached the second floor.” Every instant of every breath is on the
page.
Scavenger
is somewhat different. Although each individual section
is written in real time, there are leaps in time between each section.
Otherwise, the forty hours of the plot would have required a massive book. I
chose forty hours because the average video game takes that long to play.

SP:
In
Scavenger,
you’ve brought Balenger and Amanda back for another run through
the wringer. What about these particular characters appeals to you?

DM: I enjoy writing about
Balenger’s compulsion to retreat into the past. And I’m fascinated by the
resemblance between Amanda and Balenger’s dead wife. The first sentence of
Scavenger
immediately addresses that theme: “He no longer called her by his dead wife’s
name.” When he rescued Amanda from the Paragon Hotel, he literally thought he
was rescuing his wife. Now he must make a huge adjustment in his emotions. As
for Amanda, she’s amazingly strong: a survivor. That’s why they’re in the
novel. I didn’t intend SCAVENGER as a follow-up book to
Creepers
. But
the plot brings together a group of characters who are experts in
survival—two mountain climbers who endured a harrowing incident on Mt.
Everest, a woman who drifted for two weeks in a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean,
a Marine aviator who was shot down in Iraq and hunted by insurgents for ten
days. What Balenger and Amanda did to survive in the Paragon Hotel puts them in
that category, so in a way the book demanded that they be included.

SP:
Can
readers expect to see them in further adventures, or do you think their run of
bad luck has come to an end?

DM: Next year’s book is an
espionage novel, the first spy book I’ve written since
Extreme Denial
in
1996. But after that, I’m going to do another “eerie” thriller, and there’s a
chance I’ll bring back Amanda and Balenger. It all depends if the plot requires
them. There’s no point in repeating characters unless they bring something
necessary and useful to the story.

SP:
Scavenger
reads as if it required a ton of research. How hands-on did you
get with scavenging, “geocaching”, and video gaming?

DM: I started with a lot of
on-line research. Then I got a hand-held GPS receiver and learned how to use it
to follow a course to a specific destination. The interesting thing about
geocaching is that it sounds simple—“follow the needle to the destination.”
But objects such as rivers and cliffs keep getting in the way and demand a lot
of problem solving. It’s very challenging and interesting. As for video games,
I remember being addicted when the first versions came out. I got so obsessed
and physical as I played the games that I caused the chair I was on to
disintegrate. I almost knocked myself out when I fell on the floor. Since then,
I’ve been cautious about them. But as I note in
Scavenger
, I was heavily
influenced by the video-game theories in Stephen Johnson’s
Everything Bad Is
Good for You.
Johnson argues that the speed and complex decision making in
video games teaches players to be capable of parallel thinking and
multi-tasking. In effect, new ways of thinking are being developed. We may be
seeing a radical change in the way our brains process information. I couldn’t
wait to explore these ideas in
Scavenger
and to deal with the difference
between time in virtual reality as opposed to clock time.

SP:
You have
launched a massive promotional effort for
Scavenger,
including,
but not limited to: video and online interviews, a website for the book
(http://www.scavengerthebook.com),
MySpace pages for both yourself
(http://www.myspace.com/davidmorrell)
and Frank Balenger
(http://www.myspace.com/frankbalenger),
and even an
excellently produced online game (which I completed, by the way, but not
without much cursing and hair-pulling). After a similar campaign for Creepers,
how effective has this kind of promotion been for you? And after so many years
in the business, do you find it’s gotten tougher to raise awareness of your
books?

DM: For writers who follow
a traditional publicity model, it’s more difficult to get attention for a book.
Fewer newspapers and magazines are doing book reviews, for example, and more books
are being published. The consequence is that authors need to find newer,
fresher ways of promoting a novel. For starters, I don’t talk about the plots
of my recent books.
Creepers
is about urban exploration: history and
architecture enthusiasts who infiltrate old buildings that have been sealed and
abandoned for decades.
Scavenger
is about a desperate high-tech
scavenger hunt to find a lost 100-year-old time capsule. When I do interviews
for these books, I talk about those non-fiction topics: urban explorers and
time capsules. Those subjects fascinate me, and I love talking about them. I
enjoy seeing the looks on faces when I tell people about the Westinghouse time
capsule that was buried at the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York.
The capstone is still there, but the torpedo-shaped capsule won’t be opened
until 5,000 years from now. Meanwhile, the chillingly named Crypt of
Civilization at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta won’t be opened for
6,000
years. I love talking about the ten most-wanted time capsules. Reporters and
media interviewers don’t like authors who emphasize plot. They want a
non-fiction subject that can be approached as a news story. That’s one new
approach to publicizing a book. The other is to use the Internet and provide intriguing
electronic ways of telling readers about a book. On scavengerthebook.com, there’s
a five minute video interview that I did with a supporting cast member of the
TV show,
Friends.
There’s a one-minute animated trailer with sound, like
a movie trailer. There’s a podcast with images. It’s all a lot of fun and only
the beginning of how the Internet can make readers aware of books.

SP:
When we
last spoke, you were embarking on some pretty exciting comic book work, but
couldn’t say much about it. Can you tell us a little more about the project now?

DM: It’s called CAPTAIN
AMERICA: THE END, a six-part comic-book series scheduled to start appearing in
September. I’m very excited by this journey into a new way of telling a story,
which is basically stop-action images similar to those in a storyboard for a
film. The story takes place in Afghanistan, and I had several goals. First, to
make the reader believe there’s a Captain America. Second, to make the
narrative as emotional as it’s action-packed. Third, to explore the theme of
the burden of being a superhero in today’s troubled world, especially a
superhero named after the United States.

SP:
Lastly,
rumor has it your next book will be entitled
The Spy Who Came for Christmas
(a wonderful Le Carre-like title). Can you tell us a bit about the book, and
when we should look for it?

DM:
The Spy Who Came for
Christmas
is the espionage novel I mentioned earlier. It’s a modern action
thriller that takes place on Christmas Eve in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I
live. We have a mile-long street of art galleries that are so spectacular when
lit on Christmas Eve that Santa Fe qualifies as a world holiday destination.
People come from everywhere to be here on Christmas Eve. During the course of
the story’s action, the main character is trapped with a family that he didn’t
mean to endanger. To try to calm them, he tells them the spy’s version of the
Nativity story. His historical espionage tale makes the traditional Biblical
testaments more vivid and dramatic. Those couple of paragraphs in the Bible are
more complicated than is generally realized. All the elements of the novel have
a strong basis in history. It was great fun to do research on Christmas Eve on
the fabulously lit street, Canyon Road, where the story takes place.

SP:
Thanks
for your time, David!

[Back
to Table of Contents]

Review:
Book
Reviews by Dorman T. Shindler

You Suck - A Love Story

By Christopher Moore
(Morrow/328 pages/ $21.95)
Reviewed by Dorman T. Shindler

Downplaying sexual imagery
in dreams, Sigmund Freud supposedly said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
Christopher Moore’s popularity arose out of the absurdist sensibilities in
novels like
Island of the Sequined Love Nuns
,
Lamb
, and
Fluke
,
wherein the author mixes Marx Brother’s-like silliness with satirical comments
on society (commercialization, religion, environmentalism). But sometimes a
silly story is just a silly: not every novel one picks up has to have deeper
meaning. But if zany comedy (ala the Three Stooges or old screwball comedy
movies of the 1930s and 40s) with a pinch of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”
sensibility is your cup of tea, then “You Suck,” modern-day love story about a
boy and his vampire girlfriend — and sequel to
Blood
Sucking Fiends
— is right up your alley.

When last we left them,
aspiring writer Thomas C. Flood and Jody (his vampire girlfriend), were trying
to locate the fiend who turned her into a bloodsucker. And when Jody was lured
by the old vampire’s sensual wiles, Tommy ended up sealing his sexy,
fang-toothed lover in bronze until he could figure out how to set things right.
Unfortunately, the 19-year-old doofus also drilled “air holes” so she could
hear him lamenting her entrapment (and know he still loved her). Like all vampires,
Jody can transmogrify, so as You Suck begins, she turns to mist, escapes and
bites her lovin’ baby on the neck.

Now Thomas has to find a
way to cure himself
and
Jody. He also needs to once and
for all take care of Elijah, the creep that turned Jody into one of the undead.
But Thomas and Jody are now being stalked by a group of convenience store
workers (with whom Tommy once hung out) that hunt vampires in their spare time,
as well as professional vampire hunter from Las Vegas named Blue. So Tommy decides
to get some help in his efforts to keep Jody and himself from being staked
through the heart: he enlists his own version of Renfield, a Goth California
girl named Abby Normal (even Moore can take the silly thing too far sometimes).
But Tommy’s real concern is over how to make a relationship work when you’re on
the run and needing to drink blood to stay alive.

It’s not entirely fair to
say Moore’s vampire books (both of which are “love” stories) are without any
redeeming satiric value. The author does take some hilarious (if sophomoric)
jabs at the growing subgenre of vampire/horror fiction — a perfect target
since many of the books and authors take themselves too seriously. One chapter
(less than a page in length) is titled, “The Last Poop.” And in this passage,
Moore pokes fun at the granddaddy of them all,
Dracula
:

“Could he really deal with
three luscious vampire brides? Would he have to bring them a kid in a sack the
way Dracula does in the book? How many kids a week would it take to keep them
happy? And where did you get kid sacks?”

You Suck
is the
literary equivalent of
Scream
films: not high art, but not bad
when looking for a bit of fun, light entertainment.

 
.

Skylight Confessions

By Alice Hoffman (Little,
Brown/256 pages/ $24.99)
Reviewed by Dorman T. Shindler

Like Washington Irving and
the other New England Fabulists with whom she identifies, Alice Hoffman
(Practical Magic, The River King, The Ice Queen) writes fiction cloaked in
myths. Her influences also extend to the other side of the Atlantic, and can be
found in the writing of The Brothers Grimm or Emily Bronte. It was Bronte’s
“Wuthering Heights” which inspired a 20th Century interpretation by Hoffman
(“Here On Earth”). So the fairytale references which permeate Hoffman’s
lilting, romantic prose in “Skylight Confessions” come as no surprise.

Like many Hoffman creations
before her, seventeen-year-old Arlyn Singer is a young woman who believes in
fate and true love. And when her father dies — leaving an only child who
is “just plain and freckly” and minimally educated on her own — Arlyn
decides that the first man who walks down her street will be the one whom she
loves forever. As is the case with most fairy tales, the man’s name is a
reflection of his soul (Hoffman’s novels are nothing if not fairy tales that
address worries of adults, whether the concerns are about love or family or
death). The young couple marry and move into a house built by John’s late
father, who was an architect. The house is made of largely of glass, and is
dubbed “the Glass Slipper.” Of course the couple’s relationship proves to be a
rocky one, involving heartache and misery. Their son, Sam, is an antisocial boy
with a near-genius IQ; but John ignores him, taking out his unhappiness with
Arlyn on Sam. It isn’t long before the mismatched couple turn to others for the
love and understanding they crave. Arlie’s affair with a window washer even
results in a child — a girl named Blanca — whom John never realizes
isn’t his (John is too oblivious, wrapped up in his own misery).