Interviews

STEVE RASNIC TEM INTERVIEW

Interviewed by Leanne C. Harper

Q: First of all, please give me some background.

A: I was born in Jonesville, Virginia, which is in the heart of Appalachia. I went to college at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and also at Virginia Commonwealth. I got a B.A. in English education. In 1974, I came out to Colorado and studied creative writing at Colorado State. Other than that, I am married, have three kids and live in a large house.

Q: That's good, with three kids.

A: Yes.

Q: Reading your stories and the introductions to them reminded me of something I had almost forgotten: you were first known as a poet. Why did you begin working in poetry?

A: I've always written both. When I finally decided that I really needed to do something about being a writer and to learn more about what I needed to learn, it occurred to me that, in terms of formal education, you really needed a formal education to be a poet. You didn't need a formal education to be a fiction writer. That's partly because the theory and practice of fiction is accessible because of all the books. For poetry it's a little bit harder to find your way because there are so many different schools and ways of thinking about it. I decided I wanted to study poetry at a graduate school level. I got involved in the writing program at C.S.U. and, although I was concentrating in both fiction and poetry, most of the academic work I was doing was in poetry.

Also, poems are shorter.

Although it can take a long time to write a poem. Actually, I find poems to take about as much time to write as a short story. But they take less time to revise--at least they do for me.

I started publishing poems. From there, I got interested in doing more prose poems. That seemed to affect the fiction I was writing then. The fiction got really surrealistic and strange and highly poetic. Then I went back a little bit and decided that the best poems were poems that had very simple kinds of surfaces. All the surrealistic energy went into the imagery instead of the language. The language wasn't so warped but maybe the images were. From there, writing more and more prose poems, the fiction was actually getting shorter. I started writing lots and lots of one thousand- and eight hundred- and nine hundred-word stories that were short-shorts but they were not structured like most short-shorts. Most of the short-shorts I've read hinge on a twist ending. Mine never did. They were meant to be complete in and of themselves. They were supposed to take you from point A to point B in a very, very short space. Prose poems and poetry taught me to do that. They taught me how to do a lot of things in just a very few words.

At that point, I started writing lots and lots of short fiction. In part because it gave me more freedom than poetry did. Poetry is still extremely difficult to write. It is also unforgiving. One bad line can destroy a poem. One bad line usually won't destroy a short story.

Q: Are you still writing poetry?

A: Yes. I'm not sending out much [to be published]. Occasionally, science fiction editors will ask me to write poems for them. I will usually try to do that. But other than that, the kinds of poems I'm working on now are pieces in which I've been rethinking what I have been trying to do. I'm trying to re-establish a voice for the poems. Because I write so much fiction, at a certain point it becomes hard to decide what's oing to be a poem and what's going to be a story. In the past, I would know right away but because my fiction has become looser and has gotten a wider range, I have been able to do more things in fiction. That has narrowed the area where I would do a poem to a very small area. I am trying to figure out what things to write about for poems and what line length matches my voice. But I'm still writing it.

Q: Why did you begin writing speculative poetry and fantasy--not necessarily in the "unicorn" sense but dark fantasy and horror-- both in poetry and in your fiction? Why did you fall into these categories?

A: I always wrote about fear and dark kinds of things. And I always tended to write stories that had a fantastic approach to the material, stories that emphasized the primacy of the imagination more than the primacy of the real world. I just backed into being a dark fantasy writer. I never thought of what I wrote as dark fantasy or science fiction or fantasy or anything like that. But that was always the kind of material I read, for fun. I never really thought of what I was doing as being the same thing as these other people were doing. But because the short story market seemed to have collapsed everywhere except in science fiction, fantasy and horror, I started sending pieces to editors. The first thing I sent out, "City Fishing," was to Ramsey Campbell for NEW TERRORS. It was based on a nightmare I had had and I thought, gee, this is kind of scary so maybe this is horror fiction. So I sent it and he bought it.

I started writing other things with the idea that I was writing horror fiction. I wasn't really sure if I was convinced of what horror fiction was at that point, but I started writing other pieces that seemed like horror fiction and selling those. Eventually, I took apart the pieces of my graduate writing thesis, which was stories and poems. I started selling those to science fiction, fantasy and horror markets even though when they were written I had no idea at all that that's what they were.

It is only recently that I have started writing about any traditional horror figures at all. The last couple of years I have written my first couple of vampire stories.

At some point, I decided that the things I was writing were some variety of the ghost story. I went back and reread some things that I had read as a child, especially M.R. James, and decided that these stories don't seem all that standard and traditional either. These stories don't have to be ghost stories. These could be something else.

Q: Most of what people have seen to date of your work has been very short pieces to short pieces of writing. You've just sold a novel, EXCAVATIONS, but that won't appear in print until early next year. Horror and dark fantasy have always been fields in which short pieces have stood out and been a major part of the body of that literature. Why do you think that is? Do you feel you can sustain the impact of a short work of horror over a novel's length?

A: For myself, my fiction has gotten longer. I have written one one-thousand-word piece in the last two years. Right now, my average story is five thousand words. Which still isn't super-long, but it is long for me.

As far as the field, I think that most horror novels are failures. I've thought a long time about why that is. Part of it is that that intense effect is hard to sustain. When you start writing a horror novel, you find yourself doing all these little tricks. One trick is to have the main character be the place. Maybe "trick" is too pejorative but it is somewhat of a gimmick in that, by making the place a character, you can write a lot longer without the prose getting really flabby. Or there is the multiple point of view novel, which you do to stretch it out.

A number of writers are experimenting with how to sustain the tone over a number of pages without giving everything away. Charles Grant is a good example of that. Some of his books will go on for a hundred pages before anything that you could put your finger on and say that's supernatural has happened. That's one way he does it. It may just involve having to work a little bit more on character to sustain these books.

The most successful horror novel that has ever been written is THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE by Shirley Jackson, except it is not really a novel. If you look at it, it is a hundred and twenty or thirty pages. It is more like a classic novella. Even in its structure, it is a novella. I've heard the same thing said about mystery novels. That the only truly successful mystery novels have been really somewhat extended novellas. That structurally and everything else, they really are novellas.

But all this may change. Now that horror writers are thinking of themselves in more mainstream terms and are experimenting more and expanding what horror fiction is it won't be so much of a problem anymore. Where it becomes a problem is where the horror is central to the book. That's when it becomes difficult to sustain it as a novel, at least in my eyes, successfully. Once writers create novels about characters and about fear, and the supernatural elements become a part of that--not the main aim of that--writers will be writing more successful horror novels.

Q: That ties in to the next thing I was going to ask. Stephen King is famous for having normal people living normal lives when suddenly some supernatural element strikes at the heart of their lives and does things. Your stories are just as rooted in normality but the horror usually comes from that normal life and the "normal" relationships within that life. That connects, I think, with what you were saying about the place of the supernatural in the whole story.

A: What I think about fantastic literature of any kind, and for some reason it is more obvious in horror fiction, is that there is really a continuum. You can present these characters as if they are innocents who are being assaulted by the horrors or you can start with the very beginning, as if the horror comes out of something intrinsic to the character. There is a lot of debate about that but I think there is very little difference between the two. Even with Stephen King, there is a sense somewhere that these people deserve what they are getting somehow. They are so nice and they are so likeable, you are just waiting for them to wake up and realize that maybe some sort of flaw or something in them has caused this to happen. I don't know if that is Stephen King's intention or not but at least when I read his work that's the reaction I have. Even more so if you read his realistic fiction. There almost always is a direct connection between what they have done and what kinds of people they are and what happens to them.

You can do it either way. I am more comfortable with being more self-conscious about it and having the connection be up front as to what's going on here. For me, it is basically a principle of good, concise writing. Everything in the story should have something to do with the character. That immediately forces whatever fantastic events happen to characterize his character in some way. It has been more of a technical thing than anything else.

Q: One of the things that I find in your stories is that there is a blurring of the line between "real" horror--the vampire in the closet and the werewolf under the bed really existing in terms of the story--and what may be imaginary horror. In much of your work, events may be interpreted as outside forces working on the characters or it could be the neurosis or psychosis of the main character through whose eyes we see the events. Maybe it's real and maybe it's all in his head. Is that an effect you try to achieve or is that all in my head?

A: In part, I try to achieve that. But, again, that is an outgrowth of my feelings about technique. If you look at the story as an object you are making and everything in the story has to have something to do with every other thing in the story, therefore every scene, every object, has to have something to do with the main character. That's where you get into this blurring where it could be psychological or it could be supernatural. It is just the result of the fact that it is fiction. Some writers set out to write pieces which are almost realistic fiction with the added supernatural thrown in. I can't do that or I have no desire to do that.

But it's funny. It goes back to the fact that all this is a continuum. I know Charles Grant strongly states that he intends to write supernatural stories. He has talked occasionally about preferring supernatural fiction over so-called psychological fiction. Except when I read his work, it is always psychological to me. I read these events as having very direct connections with the characters. In part, I think that is really what all fiction is about. I don't know if this is really an outgrowth of a particular philosophy of mine, of an intent to be psychological. More, I feel that I have no choice because I am writing fiction which has to be psychological. In order for it to be non-psychological and to be somehow realistic horror fiction, we have to pull a lot more tricks. We have to somehow throw all this stuff into the story to make the reader feel as if they are reading a very realistic kind of tract. I suppose to me the more natural thing in fiction is for it to be psychological kinds of characterization.

I hate to bring up gestalt therapy but there is this old gestalt dream interpretation idea that everything in a dream is a pieceof you. So if you are in a dream and you are sitting at a table in a large chair and there is a dim light overhead, the dim light is part of you and the table is part of you and the chair is part of you. I see short stories the same way. It particularly becomes obvious in something like horror fiction when there is all this fear and anxiety going on. Part of the fear and anxiety is that you are beginning to see pieces of yourself in the landscape of the story. What is really frightening the character is something in him- or herself, not something so much out there. Or maybe it is that what is out there is also him- or herself and there isn't that clear a dividing line. To me, that's what fiction is.

Q: Talking a little bit more about dream imagery or just dreams, UBO-UBO (an unfinished novel), "Firestorm," EXCAVATIONS, "Preparations for the Game," you mentioned "City Fishing" had come originally from a dream, all have dreams or specific dream imagery in them as very important components. I was wondering how many of these are from your dreams and how much is a literary device? It all has a dream-like quality to it.

A: Maybe in some of my early stories I may have used dreams as a literary device. I don't think I ever do it any more, in part because, to me, dreaming and fiction-making are very close activities. A few years ago, I was really into dream research and dream experimentation and hypnosis and past-life regression--I did all that stuff. One of the things I spent a lot of time on was a technique of conscious dreaming in which you give yourself a suggestion before you go to sleep which says I am going to dream and I am going to dream in this area. You gain control over the dream. I know I found myself having my physical hand reach into the dream and push things aside and rearrange characters and do lots and lots of rewriting of the dream as it was going on. That became more and more extensive with my dreaming. Some of it went into the stories but after a certain point, I began to see the two activities as the same. Now, I very seldom remember my dreams whereas before I always remembered my dreams. I would remember seven or eight dreams a night. Every day I would write them down and play with them and think about them. What that did to my writing process was that it made my writing process more of a conscious dreaming process. I would sit down at the word processor or the typewriter and it would be as if I was dreaming in some ways. Naturally, that affected the imagery.

I have this really strong belief in the imagination and how really strong the imagination is. You want to use it fully. To me, using it fully means going into fantastic areas and creating images for which, at times, it seems as if you can't take full responsibility. It is almost as if they are found objects and, as found objects, they are almost against interpretation because they are almost like a piece of another world. As such, sometimes they don't fit the story you are working on and you have to put them aside. I think in part that is what dreaming is. Dreaming is this found object. If you have really intense dreams, sometimes it is hard to feel responsibility for them. It is as if you are the instrument and you just stumbled onto this scene. Writing has become like that to me in some ways. When it goes well, it becomes just finding these things. That's why some of the stories sound so dream-like because some of those images are images that I feel as if I find, less than calculate out.

Q: Is that a handicap at all in terms of structure? Dreams don't tend to have neat beginnings and endings. Or can you arrange things so that there is a flow?

A: Normal dreams don't but self-conscious dreamings are very structured. It is like writing. Until recently when I stopped remembering them, my dreams for the last five or six years have been very structured, exactly like short stories. You can learn to change your dreams that way. Still, it can be awkward. You have to be a strong editor and toss things out occasionally because they just don't make sense.

There is a series of stories I've been working on recently that are intended to have really high imaginative content. I go with them as strongly as I can, like the DEADFALL HOTEL series that I have been working on. Occasionally a scene will come up which occurs in this hotel which I think is just terrific but makes no sense at all and can't stay in the story. Maybe someday I'll find a way to use it.

Q: Most of your characters have a sense of apartness. They question whether they deserve a normal life or a happy life. Frequently, they seem to find ways to be unhappy or to destroy the possibility for happiness. There is a tremendous amount of self-guilt in your characters. Could you comment on that? Or do you feel I'm all wrong?

A: No, I think that's probably true. I'm not sure exactly why that is except that, much to my wife's chagrin, I don't feel guilty about much of anything. One of the reasons that happens is that those kinds of people are the kinds of people that I imagine are closest to stepping over the edge into some other kind of reality because their real-life circumstances don't really explain what they are feeling. I think an awful lot of people are like that. What goes on in your real life and what you are feeling inside don't map out all that well together. In part, that's where horror comes from. You go looking for the missing piece. What are the images that match what I am feeling? Sometimes what matches what you are feeling are some pretty horrible kinds of things. Or if you are writing heroic fantasy or something like that, they can be some rather heroic things, too. The disparity is one of the sources of guilt.

One of my own feelings about people is that you can be almost anything you want to be in terms of who you are, what is the make-up of your personality, what are your characteristics. In a sense it is a little bit like writing a story. You just decide what is going to be there and you find some source for it to copy, perhaps. Maybe something in the real world or something imagined or something in someone else that you like and you want to copy. I imagine that my characters have that sense too because a lot of them are stuck. They are stuck on one obsession; they are stuck at one place in their lives. Maybe in their imaginations they can see how other things could be going on. But they can't get there. That's where I want them to be. By sticking your characters in one place, in one obsession, you can write rather economically about them.

Q: In one of your stories--I'm missing my note on which one--a character asks or remarks to himself that maybe people die because you don't deserve them. This is close to the ultimate ego statement, to think that people exist or don't exist because of you, but also it provides the ultimate safety net, an escape from responsibility.

A: That's true. That's a very solipsistic thing for this character to think. Right off-hand, I can't remember which story that is because it could have happened in several stories, actually.

Q: It is one of the fathers, one of your many fathers.

A: One of my many fathers. Well, that's very much a father's way of thinking. Actually, that may occur in one of my more recent stories. That's a very solipsistic thing to say but that's also one reason I've used that before. To me, that's a source for a lot of ghost stories. In a sense, I've always thought that it's not that the ghosts are haunting the house; it is the victims that are haunting the house. They are the reason that all these things are happening. Ghost stories are very solipsistic in that way. Also I think a lot of people feel that. It is an illogical feeling, obviously, when someone dies but many people feel that if someone dies and they react to it very strongly, if it is someone very close to them, they feel in part it is because they didn't deserve them. People are very superstitious. Later of course, they will realize that was crazy to think probably.

Q: Many of your stories, one way or another, are about the perils and the responsibilities of parenthood and, very specifically, fatherhood. Almost all of the main characters in your stories are not only male but they are fathers. Frequently, they feel the responsibility without necessarily getting the respect of a father or getting the love of children. There is one quote from "Punishment" that says much about many, many of your stories: "Raising children, trying to help them become civilized beings was the most frightening thing in the world. It was a horror." I loved that when I found it because it is the basis of so many of your stories. I have to wonder why fatherhood is such a curse for so many of your characters, either as fathers or children.

A: For my characters, some of the positive things have been coming out lately in some of the stories. Certainly, for some of the fathers, although fatherhood is a horror for them, they also seem to love their children very much. Sometimes their feelings are mixed about them but they also seem to be almost obsessed with their children to their own detriment.

I think partly fatherhood because I don't know anything about motherhood. That's one reason. But I've always been obsessed with fatherhood even before I was a parent. I think it's because it has become almost a cliche, an old-hat kind of idea, but fatherhood in western culture is a mess. It is a horror; it's a disaster. Fathers, until very recently, have had little consciousness that it was okay to admit that it was hard to know what to do. If you look at the general mainstream of American literature, you see lots and lots of uncomfortable fathers and bad relationships between fathers and sons and bad relationships between daughters and fathers. I've always been fascinated by that in people-watching because it has always seemed to me that this is the biggest icon of failed relationships I've ever encountered. I seem to encounter it over and over again. People I know have had these bad relationships with fathers.

But another way it works for me technically is that much horror fiction and much horror folklore has been about this failed relationship between parents and children, but probably more dramatically, fathers and children. I think that most of our legends of werewolves and vampires have come from fathers, and mothers, but maybe more frequently fathers, who have gone rabid. This is an old memory; this is a racial memory. You have this parent who suddenly behaves in a way you cannot understand, that seems magical, that seems horrible, that seems monstrous. In trying to explain how this can possibly happen because it seems to make no logical sense, we create vampires and werewolves and all these other creatures of darkness to explain it. Or not just to explain it, but to make it safer. That is one effect of horror fiction. It is a safe way to be scared. A story which is about a vampire attacking a young woman is a lot safer, and probably a lot more publishable, than a rabid father attacking his daughter. It's part of my own self-conscious approach to horror fiction that I use a lot of fathers. I would use more mothers if I understood mothers better but I think that I understand fathers pretty well.

Q: I want to ask you about motherhood and not knowing enough about mothers, which is quite valid, but one of the things I've noticed is that the wives and/or mothers are not usually present in the story. They are dead; they are somewhere else; they leave during the course of the story, usually under quite reasonable circumstances; they don't stay around and try to help their husbands. It is almost as though you are getting rid of the women in these stories, partially to focus on the child-father relationship but I'm not completely sure why they always go away.

A: I don't think it is for any malicious intent. The major reason is because that is not the relationship I want to talk about. Also you find it somewhat matches real life in the sense that these dramas get played out between a father and a daughter or a mother and a son or a father and a son without the other partner there. The other parent is there but the actual, key drama does not occur between three people. It is usually between two people. That's the way it happens in real life. Dramatically, that is the way to do it most interestingly. I think in part it is because I am writing a short story with these ideas. To put in the extra dimension of a mother and how she fits in takes it out of the short story category. When I do more novels, that is probably something I should consider doing. I found that I haven't really written any stories about mothers. I have written a lot of stories about daughters, though. The daughters are usually my most sympathetic characters. Probably a little more forceful than the sons are. That's the main reason I get the mother out of the way: she's just going to screw up the story. If she's going to be there, she's going to stop everything from happening and we won't have any story.

Q: So mothers are too sensible to be in your stories?

A: I guess I do see motherhood as basically a very sensible kind of institution. They probably don't belong in a horror story; they belong in an Amazonian heroic fantasy.

Q: I had seen mothers in your stories as being ineffectual. They always take off; they are never involved in anything going on.

A: They are ineffectual in the sense that they are absent. I try not to write stories in which there are women who are in the story who are being ineffectual by being in the story. I may have done that a few times but I try to avoid that. I mostly try to get rid of them so that you can come up with your own conclusion as to why they are not there. Maybe they can't be there. Usually, I think I kill them off.

Q: For the most part, they are dead or they leave because they can't take it anymore.

A: Well, that seems like a reasonable attitude actually. Still they are acting reasonably; they are not acting ineffectually.

Q: In "Little Cruelties" I remember being struck particularly by one incident in which the husband goes off and buys this old house. Of course all the attendant horrible things happen stemming from this. But he appears to have bought the house without anyone else in the family, including his wife, seeing it until the day they moved in. I thought that was very odd.

A: Of course that is one of the little cruelties that he commits. Although maybe that's more of a medium or major cruelty than a little one. That character in "Little Cruelties" is an example of someone who does not really see what he is doing. At the end I think you have an idea that he realizes what he has done, but he really can't see it. I guess if I am guilty of anything in my stories, it is that men come off as pretty lousy people. Not always. Sometimes they are well-meaning. I care about them. I care about all the characters. But most of my male characters have something wrong with them. That is one of the reasons why these horrible things happen: there is something terribly wrong with them. To go out on a limb, I would say that I don't know that that is that far from the truth about the culture at large. As opposed to any individual male, there are many things wrong with the cultural male. I hope that my stories show some of the things that are wrong with that figure even when that figure is trying to be sensitive. It is almost an insult, I think, when some of these men are trying to be sensitive because they--gosh, poor guys, you feel sorry for them--have been raised in such a way that most of these attempts to be sensitive are doomed to failure or at least only a partial success. To me, that's not that unrealistic as to most men I know.

Q: Going back to something that you have touched upon before, the father frequently questions whether or not he loves his family, whether or not they love him, does he really know what love is? In various stories, characters ask themselves these same questions. Also expressing affection is a major question for many of the characters. There seems to be a great deal of ambivalence about love and whether or not there is anything called love. Whether it is real or whether it is just a program he is following?

A: That's true. Again, that is something I see in most people I run across, whether they state it that clearly or not. There is this question about how do you tell if it is real love or if you are just fooling yourself or if this is an expression of need. I suppose in some ways I am a romantic in that I believe in unconditional love. I find immediately that when I talk to my friends about that, people have a hard time swallowing it. People are really ambivalent about all that.

Again, to me, horror stories are most effective when they are about the real horrors. To me, the real horrors are not vampires and werewolves and so on, although those guys can be fun. The biggest horror, maybe, is what if she dies, what if my kid dies, what if something horrible happens to them? For someone with a family, that's the big horror. Another horror is what if I wake up tomorrow and this person I am sleeping next to, I don't recognize them, I don't understand anything about them. I don't understand what they are doing. I suppose that's where the zombie or NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD kind of thing comes from. I think many people have this fear that they think they understand this person pretty well but what if one day he does this one thing and suddenly it all falls apart? I suddenly know that I don't understand them at all. A lot of people are just waiting for that to happen. They just wait for the person to do that one thing that shows all their assumptions are wrong. She or he is not the person I thought she was. I think there has been one anthology about this but someone should do another one. Love, although it is the greatest positive thing in human life, can also be the greatest horror. It is the one horror that almost anyone can face. Anyone is vulnerable to that horror.

Did I worm my way around that one enough?

Q: Another theme present in much of your work is the inescapability of the past. Whatever you have done, or in some cases, whatever preceding generations have done, will come back and get you, one way or another. There is a quote from EXCAVATIONS which has a lot to do with this and your work: "Rage remained forever in a place which had once nurtured it." Obviously, as in EXCAVATIONS, it can be a physical place but it is also the human heart in a number of your stories.

A: I believe that very strongly. It is not as if it is going to come around and get you inevitably. It's going to come around and get you if you don't watch out. Lots of horror fiction is a warning: pay attention to the stuff in the shadows because if you don't pay attention, it's going to get you. I've said before that the one kind of person I don't trust at all is the person who can't recognize his own capacity for darkness or bad things. I don't trust those people at all because they can hurt you. The really healthy person is the person who can see his capacity for darkness and also can face up to the things that he has done in the past and own the past. I'm convinced that it doesn't go away.

If there is a central motif in horror fiction, it is the ghost story, the haunted house. All the haunted house or haunted place is is about the way memory persists. It is always there and we can't get rid of it. It is almost as if it has its own existence. One feeling I have occasionally is that no matter how successful or happy or fulfilled I feel as an adult, that kid I was--even all eight or nine or ten of them, depending on the stages--they are all back there. They are all following me around and they are stuck there. They always will be. There is nothing I can do to save them. It is almost as if they are other people. That is what the past is like. That is what memory is like. Those things don't go away. The best you can do is to embrace them and say that they are okay.

Some people have accused me of being a little perverse about this. One of the reasons that horror fiction is a very optimistic fiction and a very positive kind of fiction is that it says go ahead and embrace this darkness. Go ahead and embrace all this pain. It's okay. Sure all these awful things happened to you as a child but at least they were interesting. The very fact that they were a piece of living, that they were strong enough that you remember them--they were pretty horrible so you remember them--that is a positive thing. You probably know more from that, you've lived more from having this horrible thing happen to you, in a sense. So what I'm saying is embrace all that. It makes you a fuller person. Somehow all this darkness gets translated into something that is positive and light.

Q: One of the ways, very specifically and very physically, that the past is repeated is child abuse, in reality and your work. It is carried on from generation to generation until somehow that chain is broken. Why is it so important to your work? Have you had any personal involvement with it?

A: No, I don't have any personal involvement with abusing kids. I want to get that straight.

Q: You know that's not what I meant.

A: Just to get it clear. In trying to address this question as directly as possible, there are many reasons. One reason goes back to what I said about the source of werewolves and vampires. When I say that your parents act in these bizarre, violent ways, I'm talking essentially about child abuse. Again, it has become somewhat of a cliche but I think child abuse is the big hidden crime for perhaps all of Western culture. It has always been much more prevalent than anyone has ever admitted. It is still more prevalent, even as paranoid about it as we are now, than we imagine it.

Q: You said Western culture. Do you not think it is a human problem instead of cultural?

A: I can't say with any kind of certainty but my reading suggests to me that it is more Western than it is Eastern. There have been periods in the Orient, certainly, when there has been a large strain of child abuse or child neglect. But I am not convinced that it has been as extensive or as pervasive as it has been in most Western cultures. Of course, some cultures have always been appalled by the way white, Western man treats his or her children.

That's one reason I'm obsessed with the theme. It is another one of those great horrors that I don't feel is written about adequately in fiction often. The other reason having to do with the fact that, to me, horror fiction is really fiction about children or about the child in you. Again, child abuse becomes prevalent. I'm also an adoptive father. Any time you adopt a child over two years old, that child most likely has been abused. That's a sad statistic but that seems to be true.

Q: I made all these notes about things that come up over and over again when reading your stories. These themes are both different and much more direct than many people write about. Many people are writing about the same things but they seem to feel safer writing about the werewolves and the vampires. They are to a greater or lesser degree conscious of what they are doing but they retreat from dealing with a human to human confrontation, where the supernatural comes in as a result of those relationships. But you also deal with the guilt of the survivor, whether the hibakusha in "Firestorm" or the survivors of a killer flood in EXCAVATIONS. It seems as though those who survive are actually much worse off, frequently, than those who died originally.

A: I'm not sure where my interest in survivor guilt comes from. That's part of the haunting theme, the ghost theme, in horror fiction. When I put myself in a horror-writing mode, much of this just comes up naturally because, to me, that's what the genre is. I try as much as possible to treat those things as straightforwardly as possible.

The other thing, too, is that I came out of the Sixties. I grew up in the Sixties. To me, people who made it to thirty-five or thirty-six, we're a generation of survivors. Most of us who grew up in the Sixties had friends who didn't make it, because of drugs or the Vietnam war or whatever. I have people in my past that, who, either because of the war or drugs or mental collapse, did not make it into adulthood. Even the ones who may be in a mental hospital, it may seem strange but they didn't make it into adulthood somehow. You think gee, why me. I would have been the one most likely not to survive if they had held a poll. That's something I think about. As my wife says, I don't seem to feel guilty about anything but I think I understand that kind of survivor's guilt. It is a strange kind of feeling. I think we all wish that we could have held onto a friend and pulled them through and, of course, you can't really do that. You can't really save anyone, finally. You can give them a helping hand here and there but ultimately you can't. I guess the survivor thing comes out of the Sixties for me.

Q: Now that I've mentioned it a number of times, could you tell us a little about EXCAVATIONS, your forthcoming novel. Also, could you tell us why it is set in Appalachia?

A: EXCAVATIONS is about a fellow whose family was wiped out when a coal waste dam in Kentucky gave way and essentially buried part of the region where he grew up and buried the family house. That is based actually on several instances which happened in Kentucky and elsewhere. This fellow has moved to Colorado, interestingly enough, when he starts getting these phone calls. He is getting phone calls apparently from his father, who is supposed to be dead, so he goes back. He is an archaeological student and proceeds to actually excavate his homesite and try to come to some terms with all this. As he proceeds to excavate, what he uncovers and what he is having to face affects not only him but also affects this town, which has never adequately dealt with what has happened to it in the past and its relationship with the coal industry and its own survival guilt.

It's about that region of the country because that is something I know a lot about since I grew up there. They say a writer has to live in a place and then be away for six, eight, ten years and then they can write about it adequately. I suppose that happened with me. Although recently I haven't written many things about that area of the country, I probably will in the future. That's one reason it's set there. It became the first novel, even though lots of other pieces had been started many years before that novel, because I first wrote it as a novella, which didn't work. It didn't work because there were too many unanswered questions. The characters could not stay within the scope of a novella. It quickly did not want to be structured like a novella so it had to be a novel. It grew that way.

Q: Avon Books is publishing it?

A: Yes, the end of this year or early next year. I hope.

Q: What part do you think that a sense of place plays in a story? Could EXCAVATIONS have been set anywhere? A number of your stories are set in Denver and it is very recognizable to those of us who live in Denver. Is there a direct connection or is it just literary convenience for reader or writer?

A: I don't believe in literary conveniences for the reader. Richard Hugo used to say, if you want to communicate, use a telephone. That's basically my philosophy of writing.

I'm not sure exactly why the stories appear in certain locations. One reason EXCAVATIONS takes place in the region in which I grew up is that I knew there was going to be a bear in it. So let's put it back there. Also it is a novel about childhood and naturally I would feel more comfortable writing about a childhood which takes place where I grew up. The parental stories, you may notice, have not taken place back there. They take place here in Denver where I'm a father.

The other reasons that locales come up is that, when I go to a place, I pick up little pieces and objects. Frequently those things generate a story. One of the last stories I wrote, "Little Cruelties," takes place in Denver in a little area called Globeville underneath I-70. It is a neighborhood which has been devastated by building interstates through it. That story took place there because I was writing a story about city life, and the details of city life that I know take place in Denver. The little details I pick up go into this whole theme of the city and that's why it takes place there.

I've been working part-time on a story that will take place in Tucson. I've been to Tucson once but I found myself walking around one night and looking at the saguaro cactus and thinking about a painter out in the desert and his daughter. He's painting all these night landscapes of cacti in the desert surrounding Tucson. That story came almost directly out of the landscape there. I find a lot of stories tend to do that. An object in the real world may remind me of a theme. It is a magnet, a seed. There's an object, there's a theme, then a character and there's these three things sitting there. Then they pull in a sign or a bottle or a tin can, a particular house or a building. It collects that way. A lot of my stories germinate that way. They will germinate like that for a year or two sometimes and collect pieces. When I have enough pieces, I start writing the story.

Q: What are you working on right now? And what are your plans for your immediate and far future?

A: I'm working on a series of pieces that will be a novel called THE DEADFALL HOTEL. The first of those will be appearing in Charles Grant's SHADOWS 9 in October. I don't know if the other pieces will be separately published or not. That depends. I decided finally let's have some fun and I decided to write a novel which would be a series of episodes having to do with the traditional, basic horror figures. Deadfall Hotel is this hotel on some unnamed coastline. It answers the question: where would a vampire go on vacation. They don't go to the Holiday Inn. Where would they go where they would feel safe and accepted and could be what they are within certain limits? I decided that there is this place, the Deadfall Hotel, and it gets its name from the perpetual deadfall of limbs from a wooded area in front of the hotel. The Deadfall Hotel is sprawling; I described it as following the broken line of a train wreck around the coast. It is patched together. You never can keep it all in repair. To this hotel come all these creatures or people or whatever you want. The current manager is someone who needs to be the manager of such an establishment, if you can imagine who would need to do this. But he needs to do this. He brings along his daughter as well as the ghost of his dead wife, who haunts the hotel.

Each section of the novel has to do with a different visitor. One visitor is a vampire; one visitor is a werewolf; one visitor is a zombie; one visitor is a thing without a name, which will be probably the longest section in the book. Another section will have to do with my one and only cult story about a cult which comes there to have a little ceremony. It is a fun book to write. But as well as being fun, I am trying to say everything I can say about vampires in the vampire section, everything I can say about werewolves in the werewolf section, and try to talk about what I think those things really are. To try to take some of masks away to reveal what is underneath. At the same time I am trying to be as fantastic as possible in some of the imagery and some of the things that go on.

One of the things that is fun but also has some of my best writing is that it gives me the opportunity in each section to talk about a different aspect of the hotel. For example, in the vampire section I talk about the plumbing system of the Deadfall Hotel. In the werewolf section, I have a little bit of business on the recreational department of the Deadfall Hotel and those who use it. Also each section of the book relates to a particular season of the year, except for the thing without a name section which is a year-long, season-meld phantasmagoria kind of section where things become timeless.

I'm trying to finish up the second novel which I've been working on for years and years and years which has to do with the South, particularly Virginia, Kentucky and the mountains, in the Thirties and the snake-handling church. And also--this is historically true--a group of people called the Melungeons. When the first Scot-Irish settlers came into that area of the country, they found some people already there up on a high plateau. They were speaking a strange form of Elizabethan English and worshipping some degenerate brand of Catholicism. They had no written records and no one could remember where they came from. No one has still been able to figure that out. This is about those people too.

Those are the main two projects. And miscellaneous short stories.

Q: Thank you.

© copyright 1986 Leanne C. Harper