NVF Publishing

Greetings and salutations, Craig. Been keeping busy? That was dumb question, wasn・t it? LOL!

CS: Thanks, and yes, it was LOL. Yeah, I・ve been doing the usual working on multiple projects, books, movies, music, etc.. Whitley Strieber and I have a great collaborative relationship that evolved while writing THE NYE INCIDENTS, which we sold to Dark Castle and Warner Bros., and has now expanded out more movie projects. I・m working with Preston Sturges, Richard Christian Matheson, and Jason McKean on wrapping the debut SMASH-CUT CD, and also putting together a CD of solo music. A couple of new novels in the works, some other movies and collaborative projects.

In my ideal state I・m a happy workaholic, I pretty much live for it. My dream is to be hugely overworked and overpaid. And loving every minute of it.

Just what exactly is Splatterpunk?

CS: You・re asking me?? How the hell would I know?! LOL.

In retrospect, Splatterpunk was to horror in the 80s what the Beats were to literature the 50s ・ these things run in waves, or cycles. It was a very organic extension of the culture at large, not a planned ・movement・ or anything.

Splatterpunk seems to have grown from its early incept days back in the 80s with (John) Skipp, David (Schow), Richard (Matheson), Clive (Barker), etc., into its own little mutant subculture. To me it was always about a certain gleefully willful transgression coupled with adrenaline-fueled enthusiasm in confronting scary concepts. The colors were oversaturated, the volume cranked・c everything was just a more・c vivid・c hyper-reality.

Strangely, it ended up being mischaracterized as being ・only about the gore・, or the level of violence. To me that was either willful ignorance or just opinion absent experience. A lot of ink and hot air was expended debating, then sniping, about what ・was・ or ・wasn・t・ good horror, or even good writing ・ as if there is only one flavor to choose from. Splatterpunk found an audience and sold lots of copies, and the name made for great press, even though none of the original progenitors took it all that seriously.

Note, he conspicuously adds: not the work. The work, I took seriously. The buzz? Not so much. The marcom noise, the in-the-box genre buzz. The black leather and attitude ・ well, that・s just who we were, not like I went out and bought the wardrobe for the interviews LOL

There was also a court jester aspect to it, trying to blow the dust off the tweedy academia that surrounded the whole notion of ・being a writer・. But then, I never planned on being a writer in the first place. I came out of rock and roll and studied jazz and grew up on multimedia. Maybe I was part of the first generation of writers not principally shaped and informed by literature?

For me, there was always a method to the madness; I was reaching for something bigger, more intense, and kind of smacking death in the face in the process. I still do that every time I sit down to create, but then I do that pretty much every day of my life, and probably will until I die.

The debate was fun for a while, until the literary pundits and self-designated experts got ahold of it and started churning it for their own purposes. Then it quickly became no fun at all, and perhaps worse, I felt it become a limitation to my creative ambitions… as when someone critiqued something I wrote and said it "wasn’t splatterpunk". At the time I felt like hey, if I’m one of the inventors of this, should you be taking cues from me? But you live long enough, you learn -- such a fine line between sui generis and others just building another box around you.

But strangely, by then the virus was out of the lab and rampaging the countryside on its own・c When the genre arguments became embittered and inbred, I just checked out, and went my own way. I was going through a bad divorce, another even deeper relationship came and went, my father died, the Skipp & Spector partnership was breaking up and only held together with contractual obligations and barbed wire. The NY publishing scene had started its long meltdown, as the center imploded. The Internet was starting to take off. It was time to re-define myself and my place in the world.

I had moved to Los Angeles full time, and once the partnership was over I was free to write a lot of different styles for film and television: science fiction, fantasy, horror, thrillers… I even adapted a Robin McKinley YA novel, Spindle’s End, for Disney. There was a through-line to it all, an extension of myself into new terrains. But it didn’t exactly fit neatly in one box.

I sold TO BURY THE DEAD on the heels of the S&S breakup ・ it was a very intentional departure for me, and my editor Lou Aronica had left Bantam to move up at another publisher. Lou had discovered Skipp & Spector and put us on the map. I had other authors I admire much -- David Schow, Richard Christian Matheson, Peter Straub ・ all really rooting for me as I went solo.

I had analyzed my work up to that point and boiled it down to its essential DNA: take an unreal situation and inject a level of hyper-reality into it. So I flipped it: take a completely real situation, then have it get so intense that reality unravels for the hero. Where Skipp & Spector had a body count so high that by the 5th book, THE BRIDGE, we basically killed the entire planet lol ・ in TO BURY THE DEAD I focused on one brutal senseless murder, and the ripple effect it had on the lives of those left behind.

It was a very intense book ・ not horror but one of the scariest stories I ever told. Did a lot of research into support groups for families of murder victims, tried to get deeply into the skin of a man suffering through almost indescribable loss and rage.

And then, six months after I turned the book in, my brother was brutally murdered ・ stabbed eight times and left to bleed out in a parking lot. And I got to live through what I had only imagined・c

Do you still keep in touch with John Skipp? Miss the old days? I thought your work together, Light At The End, was exceptional.

CS: Thanks, I think John and I created an interesting body of work in the course of our partnership, which lasted ten years, but ended almost twenty years ago ・ gawd, I can be carbon-dated now! LOL. Skipp & Spector was pretty much the Thing That Ate My Twenties, and it both captured and contains a lot of the manic energy that comes at that point in life. I don・t miss those days -- my life is at an interesting point and I always tilt it forward. So, the old days? I・m glad they happened, and I・m just as glad they・re gone.

John and I touch base occasionally – there was an article in NY Magazine in Spring 2009 that charted the paradigm shift in NYC and the sudden infusion of 20-somethings into the city, and the lead-in sentence cited vampires in the subways, referring to The Light At The End. The news came to me courtesy of Leslie Sternberg-Alexander, the brilliant Boho cartoonist and underground bon vivant, and one of my lifelong friends; she drew the original ・Meat the Authors・ cartoons in the first couple of Skipp & Spector books (which I had framed and matted but which sadly ended up in a dumpster in CA when my ex-wife got mad at me.)

I had written a post-9/11 screenplay adaptation of Light, and she said, you guys were like the lennon & McCartney of horror! So I contacted Skipp and proposed: what if we did the thing no one would ever see coming, which we both have sworn would never happen? It was an intriguing idea, and I already had a script ready, so I figured, why not?

But John didn・t want to; he just feels we see things too differently. We had talked about the difference between setting it in contemporary times vs. doing a period piece ・ he felt it should be the latter, I felt it worked either way but period was much more expensive, hence harder to sell and get made・c and not ultimately the writer・s call anyway. But John said no, and his answer was final・c

So, okay・c I・m just doing it myself now LOL. Ah, the classic schism at the heart of S&S, some things never change・c.

What would you say is the first thing that ever ・・horrified・・ you? I know this may cover a lot of ground.

CS: It as probably in the womb, when my twin died. I had a fraternal twin and my mom miscarried; she told me when I was a kid, and I looked at her and said how do you know the twin that died? Maybe I did and he’s just pretending to be me? I was an odd child.

After that, probably when I was ten months old, and pulled an electric skillet of frying chicken down on my head. I had 2nd and 3rd degree burns covering the entire left side of my face and all the way back to my ear. The healing process was long for a toddler, and to prevent scarring my parents had to tie my hands to my waist (so I wouldn・t pick the scabs) and keep my hyper-stimulated from the moment I woke up until I passed out from exhaustion. Which may explain a lot about me LOL.

The other strange thing was the nightmare ・ for years afterwards I would have this terrifying dream: a black wire stretching across space, quiet and peaceful murmuring, a butterfly flitting around the wire・c then it lands・c and the wire snaps and I・m buried by a mountain, muffled screaming, total panic, trapped・

The last time I had the dream I was 8 and literally fell out of the top bunk, ran and fell down the stairs, and my father caught me in the street. The next morning I had only memory fragments. My mom handed me a story she had written about it; it was in first person and talked about the accident in ways that suddenly clicked in my 8 year-old mind. Two things happened then: I never had the dream again (though I remember it), and I saw the direct linkage between imagery and the subconscious mind as a young child. It was around that time I had started reading Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, and Edgar Allen Poe. So I guess becoming not just a writer but the writer I became might have some causal relationship?

The next time, and first I was truly, consciously horrified, was also around 8, when I saw my first black and white photographs of the Holocaust. Half of my family is Jewish, and my mom explained that, had we been in Europe then, we would have been sent to the gas chambers. That was another click-point for me: it started what became a lifelong fascination and study of the Third Reich, and also filled me with a rage that completely belied my age. Maybe it・s a past-life thing, who knows・c I have a novel in the works that addresses that, but maybe only now am I actually old enough ・ and experienced enough ・ to write it.

Apart from that, though ・ I was always tuned to dark frequencies. Some of my earliest childhood drawings are of skeletons, monsters, people covered in blood. Maybe some people are born to do this. I think I was, anyway LOL・c I turned my personality defects into career skills・

Speaking of horrifying, is it true you were once a roller-skating messenger?

CS: Yup・c I might have been the first roller-skating messenger in NYC; it was the early 80s, pre-rollerblades, and I never saw another one on the streets until my last day ・ we had just sold Light -- when I caught glimpse of a guy skating through traffic on 46th Street.

I had just graduated from the Berklee College of Music in Boston when I first had the idea that became The Light At The End・c once I graduated I moved to NY and roomed for a while with John and a bunch of crazy friends from PA. We were all in our 20s and in the big city to make or dreams happen. As it happened, I got a job with the messenger service John worked for, and ended up combat-skating 20 miles a day through midtown Manhattan traffic. Perhaps not the most glorious thing for a guy with a freshly minted Bachelors Degree to do LOL.

But as it happened it was key to the success of Light in three ways: first, it gave me a gutter’s-eye knowledge of the city; second, we came to realize that messengers were the perfect people to hunt a punk vampire in the subways; and third, it actually sold the book, as I delivered it to Lou Aronica at Bantam Books as a messenger run LOL!