As you may, or may not, know, a lot of the comments awaiting approval for Literal Remains are not from real people.  They are bots, trolls, interstellar aliens, what have you; I don’t know the technical name for them, I’m not sure how it all works.  Someone, some thing, somewhere, has put Literal Remains down as needing help with auto insurance, health insurance, and erectile dysfunction.  We are doing okay, but it’s nice to know there is help available.  It’s also nice to know there is generic Cialis, in case we ever need it; the same goes for Bikini Models On Video Now! links as well.  So weeding through the real comments and the ED advertisements is a lot like panning for gold.  Imagine my surprise when I struck gold.

Sifting through the comments, I did a double take:  we had a message from Jonathan Maberry, author of Ghost Road Blues and Patient Zero.  Jonathan Maberry, Bram Stoker Award winning author and inductee into the International Martial Arts Hall of Fame.  A writer who can literally kick butt left a comment on our site.  So what do I do?  I ask him for an interview, and Mr. Maberry was nice enough to take time from his busy schedule to answer my questions.

LITERAL REMAINS:  You say on your blog, “I’m whatever kind of writer serves the story I want to tell,” mixing horror, mystery, and science fiction.  Have you ever had a story change gears, taking a turn you didn’t even expect?

JONATHAN MABERRY: All the time.  I write outlines and plan each book all the way to the end, but every story changes in the telling.  I’ve come to regard outlines as a trellis and the writing is the vine.  You can give the vine a direction  but as a living thing it will take some twists and turns you can never predict.

I also like taking risks with fiction.  PATIENT ZERO (St. Martins Griffin, 2009) is a neo-noir, police procedural, action/techno-thriller with zombies.  ROT & RUIN (Simon & Schuster, Oct 5) is a post-apocalyptic coming of age novel set in a dystopian future and yet it has heart and is built on the framework of a neo-western.  I didn’t plan either of those books to turn out like that, but I like the results.

When I started writing PATIENT ZERO I was at a diner and I started writing a dialogue exchange on a legal pad.  Until then I NEVER wrote by hand.  I had no idea what the story was or who these characters were, but I let them have their say.  I was working on another novel at the time and couldn’t really devote my full-out writing time to it.  When I finally got around to that novel I typed up my hand-written notes first and as I did so I began to get a real sense of the potential direction for the tale.  Then I spent a couple of days roughing out a storyline that I thought would be interesting to research, fun to write, and hopefully enjoyable to read.  When I had seventy-five pages of the novel done I gave it to my agent and she shopped it.  St. Martins Griffin grabbed it right away in a three book deal.  The book took lots of turns because I often left my characters in very dicey predicaments at the end of my writing day.  Next day I’d have to go in and figure out how to save them.  The ending of the novel is the same one from my outline, but the way the story got there is very different than I expected.

Research often changes a story, too.  You think you know the science enough to map out the story, but once you check with the experts you always find out some cool new things.  Often those will kick the story off at an angle.  I love when that happens.

LITERAL REMAINS: From the horror side of you, what draws you to the genre?

MABERRY: It’s all about defeating monsters.  I grew up in a pretty brutal family situation.  Lots of violence and abuse. And my neighborhood was poor, violent, racist, and hardscrabble.  I had lots of monsters in my life as a kid.  I was fortunate enough to have had exposure to martial arts through a friend and his dad, and eventually I got tough enough to defeat the monsters in my life, and to escape that environment.  Not everyone is so lucky, and there are lots of different kinds of monsters.

Horror fiction, to me, is about the metaphor.  The monsters are stand-ins for the things we really fear.  Zombies, for example, allow us to talk about consumerism, the military build-up of the Reagan years, racism, and so on.  In our real world it’s often hard to defeat those kinds of monsters, but in fiction we can drive a stake through them, or use a silver bullet, or take that head shot.

That said, so many of my favorite books in the horror genres have layers and layers of subtext, and the best ones are superb reads on every level.  Even if all you want is goosebumps or a case of the shivers.   Books like The Haunting by Shirley Jackson (a favorite of mine in book and film versions), The Legend of Hell Houseby Richard Matheson; Salem’s Lot by Stephen King, Phantoms by Dean R. Koontz, The Manitou and Charnel House by Graham Masterton, The Rats and its sequels by James Herbert, Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, The Unquiet by John Connolly, Ghost Storyby Peter Straub, Mystery Walk by Robert McCammon…I could go on and on.

LITERAL REMAINS:  How much of your own fears enter into your stories?

MABERRY:  I drew on my childhood experiences of abuse for the Pine Deep Trilogy.  The subplot dealing with Mike Sweeney taps into those memories.  But they’re memories now, not fears.

For how my fears influence my work, that can be found in my Joe Ledger novels.  I am generally an idealist and an optimist, but when it comes to the potential misuse of radical science I am a cynic and a pessimist.  I love science, but there are too many nut-jobs, greedy S.O.B.’s, and maniacs involved.  From scientists who are dedicated to pure science and don’t think beyond what they can publish to military types who fund radical research because they’re looking for the next weapon they can bring to bear.  And greed plays a huge part in it.  Look at the energy industries.  Oil, coal mining.  The Gulf of Mexico.  Our reliance on fossil fuels, past the point where a rational and practical argument can be made in favor of them, demonstrates the kind of ‘me first, me now’ attitude that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the cost to the next generation.

So, instead of becoming a ranting lunatic (a moderately short step for me), I channel my outrage into my Joe Ledger novels.

LITERAL REMAINS:  You have practiced martial arts for over forty years, and have written books on them.  How have the martial arts influenced your writing disciplines?

MABERRY:  Martial arts is a pretty good training ground for writing because it teaches skills that all writers need.  No one stands over you to tell you to write.  It requires discipline.  Self-discipline.  You have to be very focused, your thinking has to be precise.  Each of these qualities is cultivated by serious martial arts study.

Also, writers have to deal with all kinds of emotional hits.  Rejections from agents and editors, negative reviews, years of struggle to break in.  In order to survive that without giving up or giving in, and without crumbling under the weight of negativity.  That requires emotional and psychological toughness.

Plus, it helps me write authentic fight scenes…and over the last few years I’ve been giving workshops on Writing Fight and Action Scenes.  I wrote an essay on the subject for Michael Knost’s book, WRITERS WORKSHOP OF HORROR (Woodland Press, 2009).

LITERAL REMAINS:  Is there any chance of Joe Ledger visiting Pine Deep?

MABERRY:  Funny you should mention that.  I’ve worked a reference to Pine Deep into the fourth Joe Ledger novel (THE OTHERS, due out in 2012).  Joe is also mentioned in ROT & RUIN, my post-apocalyptic zombie thriller to be released in October.  (It’s a quickie reference and it suggests that Joe survives the zombie apocalypse).

As far as Joe actually visiting the town…that’s something I plan to explore in a short story next year.

LITERAL REMAINS:  Lastly, what do you hope readers take away from your work?

MABERRY:  I always include a sense of fun in my novels.  Even my novelization of THE WOLFMAN had some humor in it; and my Pine Deep and Joe Ledger novels have a lot of my smart ass sense of humor.  Since we all know that life is tough and pain is commonplace, it’s important to be able to laugh at the monsters. It also takes some of their power away.

My gratitude to Mr. Maberry for this interview; thank you, sir.  Visit him at Jonathan Maberry’s Big, Scary Blog.

John Robinson
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