Nightmare Magazine Issue 6 Page 9

  I’ve had many different reactions. Some people think it’s beautiful, some find it funny, and some think it’s disturbing and distasteful. If I look at the worst or/and strongest reactions I’ve ever gotten, then the majority of them are probably related to pieces that have some kind of sexual reference. Any reaction is better than no reaction at all, yet I tend to become a bit disappointed when people get angry or upset.

  Additionally, your warped plays on pop culture, typically video game and cartoon characters, are discomfiting, to say the least. What is the purpose of integrating Megaman or Donald Duck into your work?

  Taking something familiar that a lot of people can relate to, like Megaman or Donald Duck, is an easy way of establishing a connection and an interest with the audience. The hard part, but also the most fun, is to do something original and interesting with it. Some people have great skill and they produce great pop culture fan-art, but they don’t always take it to an interesting place, and a lot of the time it simply becomes reproduction.

  Illustration is a side venture for you. What is your day job?

  Technically I don’t have a day job, because I only work nights. I’m employed as a guard at a low security prison. I have been doing this for five years now. It’s not very stimulating and it’s certainly not great, but it pays the bills and has some perks.

  You report having been rejected from art schools, but it’s clear to me that you didn’t need to be taught a thing. Reviewing your massive output from the past few years, your skills have consistently leveled up. How do you manage to produce so much in your spare time? How long does a typical piece take you to complete?

  One of the perks of my day/night job is the long twelve-hour shifts. I’m basically paid to sit awake at night and just watch the place so, unless anything happens, I have a lot of time on my hands. I always bring my laptop and wacom-tablet to work, and I keep myself busy with those in order to stay awake. Also, longer shifts mean I work fewer shifts and have more days off, and that’s when I go to my studio and paint in traditional media. Combine all that with a lot of discipline, motivation and being somewhat of a social hermit, then you have an explanation for the high output.

  In regards to how long a piece takes to produce, it’s hard to say. Some pieces are done in a session or two, while some of the traditional pieces can take months.

  In addition, your work has been featured in an exhibition, is that right? Can you tell us about it?

  It was actually two exhibitions/shows during the course of two years. Both at the same gallery here in Stockholm. I went to the gallery and asked them if I could possibly have an exhibition there, and they said yes. They took a fee and a percentage of the sales, so it’s not a big scale event where some gallery found me and showcased me to the world.

  I wanted the experience and it motivated me to paint approximately eighty paintings in two years time, which was very good for me. I sold more than I had expected, but then again my expectations were low.

  The first show was just about the experience, so the paintings were kind of random in tone and subject. The second show had a theme and a direction, and I might have been trying to please the audience a bit too much. I’m considering having a third one eventually, in which I’ll just go full out and uncensored. Sort of a big middle finger to any rules or ideas of what sells, devoid of any sort of compromise.

  You work in both digital painting and traditional painting media, correct? Do you have a preference?

  Yes, that’s correct. I enjoy them both and don’t really have a preference. There are different perks to both media. I can experiment more easily with color and composition in the digital format, and it’s a lot faster. The biggest downside is that I don’t get a physical painting that I can sell or put in a gallery. Traditional media offers a lot more randomness, like drips and textures, that can lead to great and unexpected results.

  Sometimes I feel that if I can’t produce at the same level traditionally as I am producing digitally, then I’m cheating somehow. So, somewhere in me there is a deep rooted sense that traditional media is worth more than digital. But I know that that’s not true. Artists have always used whatever tools are available to produce the best results possible, and it’s stupid to let prestige get in the way of a great piece being realized.

  Do you still draw ideas from fiction?

  I draw inspiration from fiction all the time. Not so much clean-cut ideas, but small impressions that generate emotions that I later try to reproduce. I don’t read as much as I used to, so it’s hard to name any specific inspiring author. Most of my intake of fiction consists of video games, movies, and TV. The other day I saw a Belgian movie called Bullhead, in which there is a disturbing scene involving a young boy’s testicles getting smashed with rocks over and over again. I cringed and moaned when I saw that, and that’s the kind of feeling that I’d try to reproduce and capitalize on as a result of consuming fiction.

  Other artists I that I admire and find inspiring are Egon Schiele, Gustave Courbet and Anders Zorn. In the living section of inspirational artists I’d like to put James Jean, Ashley Wood and Mattias Snygg as some of the more important influences.

  What are you working on right now?

  Right now I have a commission for a digital piece, sort of a classical portrait but with a twist. Nothing too disturbing, really. I also have a several traditional pieces going. Some are more experimental in terms of color and brushwork, while others are more typically dark and weird with a more controlled and planned process. I like to switch between different ways of working as to avoid getting bored or too frustrated.

  What’s your dream illustration job?

  I’d love to do character design/concept art for video games. I remember watching a video of the artists behind Silent Hill 2 doing concept art for the Pyramid Head character and that filled me with awe and admiration. I could definitely see myself working in that type of environment.

  Originally hailing from Northern California, Julia Sevin is a transplant flourishing in the fecund delta silts of New Orleans. Together with husband RJ Sevin, she owns and edits Creeping Hemlock Press, specializing in limited special editions of genre literature and, most recently, zombie novels. She is an autodidact pixelpusher who spends her days as the art director for a print brokerage, designing branding and print pieces for assorted political bigwigs, which makes her feel like an accomplice in the calculated plunder of America. Under the cover of darkness (like Batman in more ways than she can enumerate), she redeems herself through pro bono design, sordid illustration, and baking the world’s best pies. She is available for contract design/illustration, including book layouts and websites. See more of her work at juliasevin.com or follow her at facebook.com/juliasevindesign.

  Interview: Jonathan Maberry

  Lisa Morton

  Phrases like “modern Renaissance man” or “the real deal” get overused in reference to writers, but both seem perfectly applicable to New York Times-bestselling author Jonathan Maberry. A martial arts expert and former bodyguard, Maberry has written fiction and nonfiction, novels, novellas and short stories, graphic novels, and even greeting cards (he was one of the first writers on the “Maxine” series of cards). He has created three successful horror series: the folklore-based Pine Deep trilogy that begins with Ghost Road Blues, the Joe Ledger books (including Patient Zero, Assassin’s Code, and the forthcoming Code Zero), and the Benny Imura zombie series for younger readers. His first book as editor, V Wars, was recently published, and his novella Strip Search is featured in the forthcoming anthology Limbus, Inc. He also travels tirelessly to promote his works, and this interview was conducted in a meeting room in the Seattle Convention Center during the 2013 Midwinter Conference of the American Library Association.

  Most writers build careers steadily, maybe starting with a novel or a string of short stories, but you seemed to burst fully formed onto the horror scene around 2007, with Ghost Road Blues and nonfiction books like The Cryptopedia.

  T
here’s actually a secret history to that. First off, I’ve been writing professionally (not always full-time) since 1978, my second year of college. I started selling magazine feature articles then—I’ve done 1,200 of those and 3,000 columns. When I was teaching at Tempe University, I wrote textbooks for my classes and for other teachers’ classes. Around the year 2000 a friend of mine was starting a small press with some inheritance money, and because he was a lifelong friend I agreed to write four nonfiction books to help him get the company started. There were several results of that: one, I did three nonfiction books on martial arts for him, and then I wanted to do one that was a complete change of pace, because all my books up to that point had either been martial arts, safety awareness, self-defense, or something like that (I’ve been involved in jujitsu since I was a little boy). I decided to write a book on the folklore of vampires. It was called The Vampire Slayer’s Field Guide to the Undead. It was the only book I’ve ever written under a pen name—I wrote it under the name “Shane MacDougall.” The reason I used a pen name was that my publisher was afraid that martial arts readers would think I’d had a cerebral accident of some sort if I suddenly started writing about vampires. It turned out that book was substantially more successful than the other books combined, so it got me really interested in researching more and more about monsters. My grandmother, who was a spooky old broad, taught me when I was a little kid everything about monsters—she believed in a larger world, and she believed in everything. I don’t believe in everything. I believe in a lot of stuff, but not everything. So by the time I was eight she’d taught me how to read tarot cards and tea leaves; I knew about redcaps and hinkypunks before I’d ever seen a horror film, so I knew the folklore first. Knowing that, it’s not really surprising that I’d write a book on folklore . . . but the book was so well received that Shane MacDougall was getting invited to a lot of events that Jonathan Maberry was not. There was an acrimonious relationship developing between the two.

  The second thing that happened—unfortunately there was a falling out between myself and that publisher, and I never got paid for those books. As a result I went out and learned everything I could about the publishing industry. I knew a lot about magazines, but I didn’t know a lot about the book world because all my books up to that point had been college textbooks. So I was screwed over in that deal, but I took it as a learning experience rather than getting bitter about it. As a result now I know the business very, very well.

  The step from that to writing fiction. . .for the next couple of years, I was struggling to make an income—we’d hit a soft spot in the economy. My wife read an interview with Dean Koontz where he said his wife had worked for five years to earn the income and get health benefits while he stayed home and tried to build his career, and my wife offered me the same deal—she’d go back to work, pay the bills, get us health coverage, but I had to put in full days on my writing career. I was determined that she would not have to do this for very long. During that time, I did more research for another nonfiction book that I wanted to put out under my own name—that became Vampire Universe. I started complaining actually that I couldn’t find any novels with folklore backgrounds—most of them were Hollywood retreads of monsters. She said, “Stop bitching and write one,” so I wrote Ghost Road Blues. I just did it as an experiment to see if I had any talent for fiction, because I had never tried fiction before. And the book did very well—it won awards, it spawned a trilogy, and suddenly I was in the horror world. Part of the explosion of awareness came from winning the First Novel Award. Winning a Stoker is fantastic, but winning First Novel may be one of the most important Stokers you can win, because as much as I want to win for Best Novel one of these days, winning for First Novel indicates something about the potential of your career, and people turn and look at that. And my desire was to live up to those expectations, for them and for myself.

  Did you intend Ghost Road Blues to be a trilogy from the start?

  I did. The first draft was about a million pages. It was called Dark Harvest at the time. Right around the time I started reaching out to an agent, there was a book published called Dark Harvest, and then there was another book called Dark Harvest, and then there was a movie called Dark Harvest, so I went back to I think the twenty-eighth title choice, which was Ghost Road Blues. I knew it was going to be a trilogy, but what happened was: I wanted to pitch it as horror, but I happened at the time to run into Keith Clayton, who was an excellent editor over at Random House, and he read it, and as much as he liked it he said Random House would not allow him to buy a horror trilogy, because nobody was doing trilogies in horror—this was 2005, there weren’t many trilogies in horror, paranormal thrillers hadn’t blossomed yet. He said, “They won’t allow me to buy it, but here’s a tip: call it a ‘supernatural thriller,’ don’t call it horror.” Now, I’m dedicated to the word “horror,” and it felt like grief to me to change it. I didn’t change a word of the story, but we changed what it was called—it was the difference between not selling it or selling it to a small press, or selling it to a major for a really significant deal. It got me my agent and it got me my deal . . . but it’s horror as far as I’m concerned.

  Your Pine Deep trilogy—Ghost Road Blues, Dead Man’s Song and Bad Moon Rising—are in rural settings and have something of the feel of folktales, whereas your later Joe Ledger series are techno-savvy thrillers. What caused that shift in setting and tone?

  I’m a science geek, too. I’ve always liked the scientific background behind something. One of my favorite writers growing up was Richard Matheson, who I met when I was a teenager. His novel I Am Legend was the first novel in which hard science was used to tell a horror story. Granted, it’s not the first horror-science fiction crossover—we have Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde—but it’s the first one in which hard, believable science was used to explain it, and that book was landmark for me. Matheson gave me a copy of that when I was thirteen. My dream project if I ever write a screenplay is to write an accurate and authentic interpretation of that book and it’s never been done. The closest was the Vincent Price version, but even that wasn’t close enough.

  I read a lot of science, and to me it’s scarier if the horror is backed up by believable science because then it’s part of our world as opposed to something that’s so outré that it’s not a part of our world, it’s not connected to us. It’s not that I don’t like those other kinds of fictions—I read them. But for me as a writer, I want to tell something that would scare me. I’m not scared of supernatural monsters. I am frightened of a bacterial or bio-weapon that is misused, so I write what scares me.

  The Pine Deep books received comparisons to Stephen King, especially in the way they used a small town and a large cast of characters. Was King an influence on you?

  Absolutely. First off, Salem’s Lot stands as my favorite vampire novel of all time. I love the book, and I recently re-read it and saw that there are quite a few mistakes in it, which I find charming because it was only his second novel and he was still working it out. Even though it has some flaws, it’s brilliant, and it does what I love, which is old-school monsters. I want my monsters mean, nasty and scary. I don’t like friendly monsters. I mean, I like Spike from Buffy . . . but if I’m writing something, I want the monster to be scary. I want the story to be about people fighting monsters. My favorite sub-genre is the American Gothic. The Haunting of Hill House is my all-time favorite horror novel. Salem’s Lot is American Gothic. Robert McCammon’s Mystery Walk is American Gothic. Ghost Story by Peter Straub is American Gothic. So when I decided I wanted to write a novel, I made a short list of novels in that sub-genre that I thought were not only beautiful novels, but also spoke to me, and I read them first as a reader, then read them four or five times as a writer, deconstructing how they were built. So I deconstructed Salem’s Lot—I storyboarded it out, I wrote the outline for it, I looked at the balance between dialogue and prose, I looked at where exposition came in, at how much exposition came through what went
on as opposed to a big block of exposition, I looked for instances of hyperbole and allegory and metaphor, not just how the author used them, but when he used them. And I also looked at when they worked and when they didn’t. So I actually reverse-engineered the basic plan from those novels. By deconstructing them, I had a blueprint for what the American Gothic novel should look like in its base form. I also had a long list of things I absolutely did not want to do, because I don’t want to imitate. I don’t want to be the next Stephen King—I want to be Jonathan Maberry who appeals to the readers of Stephen King.

  I did meet Stephen King shortly after the Stokers. We met at the Edgar Awards. I sat down and talked with him, and with Tabby—wonderful folks—and he had been up for an award the same year. We were both up for the Stoker for novel of the year, and he won for Lisey’s Story. Shortly after that, he sent me a sympathy card—“So sorry for your loss. Much love, Stevie.” He was the one who pointed out that winning First Novel was more important to my career than winning Novel. And I see and agree with his point. I told him about how I’d deconstructed his novel, and he told me that if he ever teaches another novel course, he’s going to recommend that same process, because it takes you down to the nuts and bolts. It allows you write a good novel, but at the same time it keeps you from imitating.

  Your books are steeped in pop culture, be it references to scream queens Brinke Stevens and Debbie Rochon in Bad Moon Rising or the extensive knowledge of the Marvel universe on display in your graphic novels. Do you consciously try to expose yourself to a lot of pop culture?

  I’m a total pop culture geek. I subscribed to Entertainment Weekly magazine from issue one. I love the in-jokes. I like the layers of what you know and how fun it can be to have those in-jokes built in. At the same time I have to make sure that they don’t interfere with the process of telling the story, because not everyone knows those references. But I happen to know Brinke Stevens, and Debbie Rochon I’d met at a couple of events. . .all of the people who appear in that book—Ken Foree, Tom Savini, Joe Bob Briggs, Stephen Susco and James Gunn—they’re all in the horror world. I’d met them at one event or another, and asked them if I could write them into the story as themselves, and they were all delighted with it. It was fun writing that story, because it’s based around an attack of vampires during a Halloween festival. Of course there are going to be celebrities at a Halloween festival.