RM: Who and what inspired you to become an author?

Good question. I don’t know exactly. But I’ve always enjoyed making up stories, particularly scary stories. When I was young, I was into ghosts and UFO’s and Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. Saturday afternoons and Friday nights I was always glued to the TV watching reruns of forties and fifties monster movies. My parents took me to my first horror movies, a double bill of The Boy Who Cried Werewolfand Sssssss when I was pretty young. So, with all that, I grew to want to write” books, movies, whatever “and to scare people! I was also always an avid reader, both of horror fiction “cheesy drugstore pulp stuff” and of “real” books about ghosts and strange phenomena. The scariest stuff was that which was most “real” to me. Which is why, ultimately, Stephen King’s Carrie really got me into him as an author and of the creative possibilities of writing. That book wasn’t a straightforward “novel” it was a collection of interviews, articles and documentary materials that treated a completely unreal subject, such as a telekinetic girl destroying a town, as a news story, not just as a work of fiction. That made it much more engaging than if it were a standard narrative. I didn’t think about it at the time, but you could see the influence of this in my novelization of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, although obviously it was more directly inspired by the pseudo-documentary nature of the movie itself. Still, the movie was a straightforward story, albeit with everyone playing themselves, and the book used a lot of diary entries, newspaper articles, notes and such to tell the story of me writing the book. Before that, I wrote a still-unpublished book on the Friday the 13th movies, presenting them as if a famous British film historian were writing sage commentary. You can tell how much I like this style. So you see, even non-fiction authors inspire me because of the information they present and way it is presented as factual—although even the most “objective” books and articles still have some sort of perspective coloring them so that two people writing about the same “true” event might come up with different information. But to present fictional information as if it were fact, with some underlying “real information” behind it to make things plausible, that makes things even scarier, [because] in the back of your mind, you’re saying to yourself, “Gee, this could ACTUALLY happen! ” Michael Crichton, though far from my favorite author, uses this time and again for his novels. He takes an iota of truth about cloning, or physics or technology and builds a world around it that’s utterly fantastical, but founded on something quite real. Specifically, my favorite author has always been Stephen King. Obviously, he writes horror, but besides that, his ideas come from elaborations of human experience, rather than scientific fact. Misery, for example, is an extreme case of what happens when a fan is too much of a fan, and in a larger sense, the life of a writer. King is also a very good writer, who writes for people who aren’t very good readers. He’s a non-pretentious, populist author, which is why his books sell so well. But he’s not a schlock author, either. Peter Straub is also one of my favorite writers—in fact, I think Ghost Story is the best American horror novel ever. He’s much more of a “literate” author than King, much more structured, and when he’s on a groove, very very scary. But in some ways, I think he’s a better writer than the readers of the genre want, so except for Black House, his recent sequel to The Talisman with Stephen King, he’s been out of the main main stream since the eighties.

RM: How did you get into writing the Elm Street Novels? Was it something you always wanted to write about or was it something that was handed down to you as a job and you graciously accepted it?

I came to Freddy by way of Jason. I had written a book on the Friday the 13th series that I came close to getting a deal on, and then things fell through. Still trying to sell it, I got in contact with Paramount, who had released the first eight Jason movies. By then, New Line had picked up the series, and Jason Goes to Hell was due out the following year. I went broke and returned to Cleveland, calling around to New Line, whose licensing person was intrigued by my pseudo-documentary concept. He referred me to their “book packager”; basically an agent who matches licenses with publishers and then hires the writers. We tried a bit, but she couldn’t sell the book. Still, she and New Line were impressed enough by my writing and ideas, and personal presentation, that they asked if I would be interested in writing the book for the next Nightmare on Elm Street movie, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. They thought I was perfect because it was sort of a documentary. So, they gave me the script, and based on that, I wrote three versions of a sample first chapter “one that was a straightforward novelization (which the book publisher wanted), one that was a “scrapbook, ” made up of entirely “documentary” material like newspaper articles, etc. (which New Line wanted) and a version that combined the two, alternating between the story of the movie and diary pages of my own laced with documentary material. Every[one] agreed upon this version and they hired me! As a side note, it is the least “edited” of any book I’ve written. Only one paragraph was substantially changed, and that was simply because I referenced a non-New Line movie. Other than that, the book is almost EXACTLY the book I wrote.

RM: When writing the Wes Craven’s New Nightmare novelization… Did you ever talk to Horror Master Wes Craven and if so, [what] was it like to speak with Freddy Krueger’s creator?

I did not talk to Wes Craven while I wrote the book. My only “contact” with him was that whenever there was a new draft of the script (I was writing the book as they were shooting the movie), I would get the new draft so I could work the changes into my manuscript. Still, I had to get the book done long before the movie was finished and you’ll see that the ending of the book differs somewhat from the ending of the movie. I did, however, get to meet Wes at a screening of New Nightmare and we talked for a half-hour. I gave him a signed copy of the book and he eventually gave me a signed copy of the movie poster. In all, Wes is not the scary guy you might think; he’s just a nice guy from Cleveland with a vivid imagination. Yes, he is originally from Euclid. I met Clive Barker for the first time at that screening too. He’s also a nice, rational, normal guy. Something about being that grounded allows you to write about funky stuff without losing your own perspective on life.

RM: Which novels was the most fun for you? New Nightmare? The Elm Street Novels? Bone Chillers? Zorro? Hamlet 2?

New Nightmare was the most fun, because again, I was writing EXACTLY what I wanted to, and it was different from your average novelization. Also, the Bone Chillers book, A Terminal Case of the Uglies, was a lot of fun because it was an adaptation of a short story I had written in high school. Plus, I named the characters after my brother’s family; the main character, Eric Adam Ross, is named after my three nephews. The only novel that was a chore was Zorro and that was my fault. I was having writer’s block and wasn’t connecting with the material the way I did the Freddy stuff, although in the end, it turned out okay, I guess. Still, I was supposed write a second Zorro novel, but gave it up, fearing I was going to do a poor job. So, I made it up to everyone (hopefully! ) by introducing my editor to a friend of mine who’s an even more prolific writer than me, John Whitman, who wrote the Star Wars Galaxy of Fear series. He ended up writing the third book in the Zorro series and everyone was quite happy with his work.

⇐ Предыдущая123Следующая ⇒

Поделиться: