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Douglas Clegg
A: It's funny you asked this, because one of my short novels about the end of childhood is about to come out. The mass market paperback of Nightmare House & Purity comes out in May from Leisure Books. Purity is about teenagers at a particular point of life, and I drew heavily on my memories of that time—right around high school graduation—for that short novel. I tried to sink back into the details of life then, my view of adults, of other people my age. And it really helped in the writing of Purity.
I was just comparing notes on childhood with a friend who
barely remembered anything at all. I can still remember the full names of
kids from about first grade on, as well as adventures and misadventures. I can
recall the first dirty joke I ever heard as a kid, the first time I swore, the first time
I wrote a short story, and pretty much all of the firsts.
I think from a very early age, I was an observer of others and not a participant
as much. That might be the reason. I was always off writing stories or drawing
pictures, but watching the world the whole time. It helped that I knew I wanted to
be a writer, so that I really had to observe how people did things, what they were
thinking about (when I could get others to talk about it), and how things worked.
I knew that would be important later on as a writer. I couldn't ignore even the most minute detail as a child—I had to take notice of things and people and books and places I went.
I also felt as if the world didn't work right when I was a kid, and I guess feeling
that way about it, everything stood out for me. Among other differentedness, I was
left-handed, and any kid who is left-handed knows, the first day of school, that the
world of academics—from the desk to the way we write (left to right) at all—was not
made for left-handers. I think this really helped me notice—and remember—things.
A: When you write about people, you write about what you know of people. In writing my
recent novel Afterlife, which will be out sometime down the line from Signet, I think all
those themes you mentioned are in there, and then some (including psychic talk show
hosts, erotic nightmares, loss of a loved one, and even a missing corpse.)
Regardless of whether there is a ghost,
or not a ghost, a murder or a quiet, dark story, I'm writing specifically about
human beings and what we go through. I create a story around this, build a
world that may or may not exist, but my writing is solidly within what human
beings experience psychologically. So, difficult childhood (I know few people who
were exempt from this), loss of personal control, family in jeopardy, even
spiritual transformations are all within the realm of the human. So maybe those
things are in my novels. I just see my novels as stories about people in particular
places—and they grow from there.
With some of my novels—like The Hour Before Dark—I take this quite seriously,
and with others, like my Andrew Harper novels (Bad Karma and Red Angel) I'm a bit
lighter on the psychological aspects and focus more on plot.
A: Before I answer your question, I'd love to know from readers if they were annoyed that
Bruno Raglan was gay in my novel, The Hour Before Dark. I wanted to create a gay character in Bruno, where it was important that he was gay, because he lived outside the mythos of the Raglan family by virtue of his differentedness from the rest of the family.
That's an interesting question. I can't tell anyone else what to do with his or her life. I suspect most people have a sense for what they want to do with their lives and how much of their lives they wish to make public. Where the public and the private intersect, I think people have the right to their privacy if that's their wish—on any aspect of their private life.
The most interesting aspect of the question is: does the artist/writer owe the public
anything beyond the work itself? I really can't answer that for anyone else but me. First, I don't think a writer owes the public (as far as his or her writing goes) anything more than the best writing from that writer, and dedication to a sense of truth—whether conveyed in fiction or nonfiction.
In a perfect world, nobody would have to know a writer or artist at all: you'd know the
book or the painting, and anything beyond that would simply be someone else's life.
But we live in a world where people want to know where everyone stands. I'm as guilty
of that as anyone. And in case this question was a veiled way to ask me, of course I'm
gay, and have been for a long, long time. I've been with my husband (we're both husbands), Raul,
for about 15 years, and we very much partner on the creation of my novels—with me doing
the writing, and Raul handling just about everything else to make sure I keep focused on the writing.
Regardless of my own personal feelings about this, I suspect sometimes it's better to know less about
any given writer, no matter what his or her life is like. But I do think fans like to know—and are always
supportive and fairly caring people, from what I can tell from fans of my work.
A: I approach writing like this: I wake up and think, there's "this story idea in my head."
I start writing it. Suddenly, I realize it's done. Only a day or a week has passed.
That's a short story.
But sometimes I wake up and start writing, and four days later, I've accumulated 52 pages
and I haven't yet reached the end. That probably will be a novel. They take anywhere from six
months to twelve years to complete, depending on any number of other factors.
I prefer the length at which the story reads best to me. I love writing short stories,
primarily because they're short and they're done in such a nice brief amount of time. But I don't
often get short story ideas.
I seem to be writing novella to novel-length works now, so I just go with it. In
2003 I finished one novella (The Attraction), and one novel (Red Angel).
I don't think I managed to write a single short story that year.
In 2004, so far, I finished up
The Priest of Blood and Night Cage (an Andrew Harper novel), and will be working through
at least one more novel this year. I'm not sure I have time to write short fiction, because
the novels definitely are calling to me, and they're becoming more and more of a
compulsion for me.
As a plug here, my massive short story collection, The Machinery of Night, will be out
in a limited edition hardcover from Cemetery Dance in April 2004. It contains a ton of
short fiction that I've written since the beginning of my fiction writing career onward, including
the stories "Where Flies Are Born," "People Who Love Life," and some that have never
before seen the light of day, as well as a few poems. I think there are more than 30 stories
in it.
A: I haven't yet read the Gunslinger books, so I don't know how King's doing it, but
I definitely will bring various books I'm working on into one long history. However,
this will be so piecemeal as to probably not be noticed until I'm 70.
The Vampyricon, the series I've begun with my novel, The Priest of Blood, begins it's
life set in the 12th–13th century, yet there is at least one element from it that will
play a role in the Harrow series (which consists of The Necromancer, Nightmare House, Mischief,
The Infinite, and, upcoming, Isis and The Abandoned.)
But The Vampyricon is, itself, set in the world of The Serpentine Path, which I hope
will be the broader work that encompasses, ultimately, the beginning of time onward.
The main element that hooks between the Vampyricon and Harrow series is the Chymera
Magick, which is the occult society that Justin Gravesend joins in the mid-1800s as a young
man. At some later date, when he has become rich beyond his dreams, he builds the house of
nightmares along the Hudson Valley, which spawns the other novels of Harrow.
Meantime, in The Vampyricon, I bring in the Chymera Magick's origins as a cult of necromancy called
the Chymers. The Vampyricon consists of The Priest of Blood, Our Lady of Crossroads, The Serpent's Venom,
and The Tale of the Pythoness (these last three will be published year-by-year.) I have even projected
another series around The Vampyricon, all within the world of The Serpentine Path. I suspect this
will be something of my life's work—at least for another decade, since my imagination has suddenly begun to
focus and go off into this mytho-historical-fantasy area of fiction. I anticipate writing at least one
dark fantasy a year, and at least one contemporary horror novel per year, for quite awhile.
Whew, long answer!
I know that sounds insane, but there you are: I'm a writer.
A: Harrow has somehow sustained a few books so far: Nightmare House, Mischief, The Infinite,
and The Necromancer. I always find something new about that house every time I approach it.
There were several inspirations—all old manses along the Hudson River. But mainly
one house, called Wyndcliffe. It is a haunting, beautiful, stunning house. That's the
exterior of my inspiration. A guy named Tom Rinaldi had set up a website of his photos of
some of these houses. I had seen a few on trips to the valley, and then after looking at his
photos, I had to go up there again and hunt down some of these places. Some are castles,
some are mansions, but all seem to be haunted. Wyndcliffe apparently inspired Edith Wharton
many years ago, and inspired me with the idea of Harrow—a house of infinite hauntings.
The interior inspiration came about because I wanted to find a way to write every
kind of haunted house novel that could come to me, and place it within a larger
mythos. I wanted to make Harrow, the house, a crucible for various hauntings and
psychic manifestations. It really is a house of resonance, because by itself it is
not full of ghosts. In many ways, it's the people who arrive to it that bring the ghosts
with them. But Harrow is like an echo chamber for psychic sparks. It contains arcane
artifacts and occult objects of great power, but it is the people who cross its threshold
who awaken it.
I've spent some time working on a new Harrow novel, called The Abandoned, which
probably won't be out for a year or two.
A: Well, I have had a lifelong fascination with Celtic, Breton, Welsh, Irish, Scottish,
English, Spanish, and French culture and history. I traveled a bit in Mexico, England, Wales , Scotland,
Spain, and France as a young person, so I became interested in the culture and land and
people of those places fairly early in life.
I began to pick up bits and pieces about Wales itself (one of my favorite
places on the planet.) Then, when I wrote the Harrow novels, I began to piece together
who and what Justin Gravesend was. Who was he when he was young? What started him
on a path that would lead to building one of the greatest haunted houses—on purpose—many years later in America?
I love tales of young, debauched Brits. I really do. Writing it, I wanted to bring this kind of
Victorian erotica sensibility into the idea of this kind of hellfire club of sorts, only in this
case, a cult of necromancy, as the coming-of-age story for Justin.
I loved creating him, and I loved following him. Sometimes, all a novel takes is for me
to start channeling a character and seeing what the character sees and going where
that character goes. In my mind only.
A: Everything you've read about me is probably true.
Well, the novel for Tor is called Thriller, but it has taken a bit more than a year too long to write. It's
about a lot of things, but it begins with the execution of a convicted killer and a woman, related
to a victim of the killer, as a witness to the execution. A note from the soon-to-be-executed killer
is passed to her, and it tells her something that sends a chill down her spine—and
puts her on a dark journey. I've found it a difficult book to write because my first editor,
Jenna Felice, died after acquiring it for the house, and unfortunately, when I worked
on the book for any length of time, I thought of her a lot and wished she were still around.
She was a unique and wonderful person, and she left this world too young.
The book itself is also more expansive than some of my other work, and I've spent
enormous amounts of time researching it, which has been more fun that I'd realized
it would be.
A: The movie was optioned, it all looks good to go, and we'll see
how it goes from there. I hope it gets turned into a great movie, but if it doesn't, I feel the book
will still be there for anyone who wants the story.
When my novel, Bad Karma, was bought for the movies, I had high hopes. These were dashed by
the final movie, when I saw it, although I have to admit, horror may be the one genre where sometimes
a good "bad" horror movie is perfectly fun for a rainy Friday night with friends, a bowl of popcorn and
a sense of goofiness. Patsy Kensit was great in the movie, and I laughed my way through it.
One friend wrote to tell me how appalled he was at the adaptation and how I must've felt violated.
Well, I felt so violated that I went out and spent all the money they'd paid me for the movie rights,
and then suddenly got a nice warm feeling from it. Didn't bother me at all beyond the shock of the first
screening of the movie. I wrote the novel in about three or four weeks—I didn't really expect the movie to be
Lord of the Rings or even The Others. Weirdly, the camera work was exquisite for the movie, and again,
Kensit was wonderful and I'd like to write her an apology about the script that she had to draw from (which
I didn't write, and yet still I feel the need to apologize for.)
A: But did he say if it was for rent or lease-with-option-to-buy?
Given that it's House of Leaves, it would be kind of funny to have one of those
realty signs, "NOT FOR SALE," planted in the front yard on the cover of the book.
I suspect that novel would be nearly impossible to film. Most of my novels would be
fairly easy to turn into movies.
I have no problem with movies being made from my novels. I think
my stories tend to be fairly cinematic, although a few are probably too cerebral to be
filmed well.
On the other hand, maybe Mark was using reverse psychology. In that case, I should probably
play the coy virgin and say "not for sale" on all my books for the movies. Well, unless I get
sweet-talked into giving them up.
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