Douglas Clegg: Sheherazade ‘s Scion

The more advanced a technology, the closer it brings us to our roots. Multi-award winning horror author Douglas Clegg uses the Web to revive the glory days of the penny dreadful by spinning out the tale of one darkly bewitching chapter at a time. For free.

The new-old notion of a serialized novel delivered in convenient weekly installments is proving irresistible to dedicated Internet junkies and the traditional press alike. But what prompted the writer of The Halloween Man and the soon-to-be released The Nightmare Chronicles to take this unusual and (for a print-published writer) potentially risky step? How far do the answers reach into Clegg’s own roots?

Crescent Blues: Growing up in a family where your mother was an artist and your two brothers were opera singers, what prompted you to become a writer?

Douglas Clegg: My mother was a fairly frustrated artist, actually. She put aside painting just about the time I was a toddler and never went back to it, which I tend to think is the tragedy of her life. I was nine years old when I knew I was going to be a novelist, and no one actually encouraged me, although my mother, very smartly, bought me a typewriter then, and I taught myself to type because my handwriting was so awful. Typing feels like composing on a piano to me. She did discourage me from being an artist, which was my aim until the age of nine, and lest you think I’m joking, ask some rather serious seven-year-olds what they intend to become when they grow up, and you’ll usually hear the truth.

Has your family’s talents influenced any other creativity on your part (i.e. I understand you are skilled musically as well as with words)?

I am not all that skilled musically at this point. I have some slight aptitude with music — I used to compose a little, but my technical skills in that area are terrible. I would say that the emotional storms that brewed in my family influenced my writing more than anything. Any time you frustrate an artist, you end up with a lot of disturbance in a household, and my mother is the ultimate frustrated artist. I always encouraged her in various ways to go back to her art, but she has refused in the manner of one of those Edith Wharton or Henry James heiresses blocking out the unsuitable suitor at the door.

Your career seems to have been consistently linear. Majoring in English literature, going on to journalism, working in publications and TV news. Was writing something that you always wanted/planned on pursuing?

Yes, but in many ways, the jobs I had before I began writing fiction hit me in the back of the head, and of course, I took them whenever they hit. It does seem consistent. At the time, I really thought I was floundering with no direction — I went from teaching English to working in magazine publishing to working in television to writing a novel. None of it seemed to add up, but of course it did.

My twenties were definitely my apprenticeship period. I have to tell you, though, the TV news job hit the way they always do in Hollywood. I was at my first Hollywood party, at some minor league TV star’s home (a writer friend got me in), and someone pretty much offered me the job right there, and I hadn’t even mentioned I was looking for a job. Go figure.

What sort of publications have you worked for?

Well, I only worked for Ziff-Davis, in the aerospace publishing area that they used to own in the 1980s down in Washington, D.C. I was there for a few years. During that time I was a contributing editor/writer on a small magazine, also in Washington.

That got me up to New York regularly and forced me to get to know people in a way I hadn’t before. I had to be overtly social and get whatever story I needed to get. I wrote on entertainment, movies, fashion, whatever they threw at me. That was a fun time, because it was a young magazine that also staged promotional parties all over the city.

Were there any notable experiences (good or bad) that you had with them which you feel was beneficial or had an effect on your writing?

Well, I learned that what I loved to do was not sit in an office and feel like I was circling computer sheets all day long. That was pretty much the extent of the editorial work at Ziff-Davis then. Sometimes, for novelists, the best jobs are the ones that make you want to write your book in order to get far, far away from the job.

I have to admit, working in television news was fun. I probably would’ve been smarter in the scheme of things to not have walked away from that work to write my first novel, but who knew? I was about 28, and just didn’t like office politics. The Eighties were a bit of a crazy time, too. No one has quite written about it. It was a crazy time, where a lot of fools moved up very quickly, with their BMWs and cocaine habits intact.

Your first novel, Goat Dance, was nominated for Outstanding First Novel by the Horror Writers Association. Was it the first fiction you’d ever written or had you dabbled in short stories or other novels, possibly even the sort that get hidden under the bed and never see the light of day?

I had written two short stories before I wrote Goat Dance. One I submitted to Twilight Zone magazine, and it was rejected in their normal six month time period. The other, I sent to Dave Silva at Horror Show. He rejected it, but his rejection had been briefly personalized with a note about the problem of the story.

That short story went on to become a 12-year endeavor for me which is just about to end — it became my novel, You Come When I Call You, which comes out soon. Then, I quit my job at KCBS and sat down in North Hollywood to write Goat Dance. It came out about six weeks later in rough draft and then two or three weeks later, I had the final. I sent it off. A year later, Pocket Books bought it.

It was my first novel. I had made one attempt when I lived in Paris to write a novel when I was in my early twenties, but the hundred pages that came out went nowhere and I threw them out, happily.

How many publishers did you have to send Goat Dance to before you were accepted?

One other than Pocket, and actually, they sent it to Pocket, not me. I sent it to a small paperback house that no longer exists, and the editor wrote me back asking if she could take the book over to Pocket Books. She did, and a couple of months after that, my editor at Pocket bought it.

Most of your novels, Breeder, Dark of the Eye, The Children’s Hour, Neverland and to some extent in the latest installments of Naomi, seem to involve children, either as protagonists (Dark of the Eye, The Children’s Hour) or victims (Breeder,Naomi). Is this a conscious ploy, or do you find writing children into the plot makes the story scarier?

I think life involves children and adults. There are victims among the children I write about; there are victims among the adults I write about. All adults were once children, and all children will one day be adults. Sometimes the dividing line is fuzzy, because many times children are more responsible than the people caring for them. So, I basically write about life, and while the supernatural elements in my fiction are entirely self-imposed, there is not one thing that happens to children in my books that has not happened to a child somewhere in time.

Your serialized e-novel, Naomi, concerns witchcraft. The Children’s Hour is about vampirism and The Halloween Man is about devil worship. You have been described as re-inventing all of these subjects with your writing. How do you manage to take on such familiar topics and at the same time give them such a fresh edge?

Well, actually, I don’t think of those novels as being about those things. Naomi is strongly a love story and a ghost story, with a huge dark fantasy element. The witches are just witches. I like them.

The Children’s Hour is, to me, about a man who has to reconcile with his home and his new family. He must, in essence, accept his mother as she is before she dies. The Children’s Hour is really Joe’s hour when, to defeat a monster, he must face the one person who destroyed his sense of trust. Now, that’s to me.

And The Halloween Man? Hey, no devil there in my opinion. I never quite understand this, other than that there’s sort of a dark chapel, but the creature is anything but a devil. However, I can understand why readers and reviewers would latch on to these sound bites. It’s easier to describe The Halloween Man by saying “devil worship.” I see it more as the story of a mangod discovering his true nature.

Apparently you are writing the installments of Naomi each week just before they are e-mailed to subscribers. Do you have the story very strictly plotted to do this, or is the whole thing done on the wing?

Neither. This will sound nuts, but the characters tell me the story. Naomi has been building in my brain for a few years, and in that time, the people in it have determined their stories. It adjusts and morphs a bit from what they originally present, but when it comes out, it all makes sense. OK, it sounds crazy. I just go with it. So each week when I sit down to write this, I know where I am in the story, I know what will happen next, and I know where it will all end.

But sometimes, the characters tell me to move in a different direction than I expected. Sometimes writing is like multiple personality. You know what’s crazier? All the stories and people from anything I’ve written are still in my head, and still come back to me at times. Writing fiction is its own kind of haunting.

Does this mean characters from prior works are likely to come back in sequels?

Not really. They exist in their worlds in one way or another, but a novel, in my opinion, should be the most important point in a character’s life. Anything beyond the story is of some lesser degree of importance and not all that different from anyone else’s life.

Only one of my novels, Dark of the Eye, was written with sequels in mind. It was originally intended — by me — as the opening of a trilogy which would go through an apocalyptic cycle. But by the time it came out, I was leaving one publisher and going to another, and nothing further ever developed for it. Perhaps I’ll write the rest of it one day. Perhaps not.

What is it like to write a novel where you can’t go back in the editing and tweak it because it’s already been published?

It’s fun. More fun. The restriction keeps me from beating myself black and blue over it.

Probably a very popular question but why did you write Naomi as an e-serial?

Well, I knew it was not a novel I was going to sell in the next 24 months…

I have four books coming out between now and a year from September. Perhaps five. I had been thinking about Naomi for a few years — actually, since 1991. It was time. Then a friend, who is an online book publicist, suggest I send short stories out free in email to reach readers who had not yet discovered my fiction. Instead, I figured: why not a whole novel? I didn’t count on the huge amount of attention this would garner — Business Week, Publisher’s Weekly, The Dallas Morning News, etc. I just thought it would be me and maybe a couple of hundred people reading it, if I were lucky. Now, it’s thousands.

What are the four or five books? Have you started them yet?

The Nightmare Chronicles, You Come When I Call You, an as yet-unnamed horror novel to be out in paperback in the fall of 2000, and a short novel called Purity to come out sometime in the winter of 1999 – 2000. There may even be another novel out in 2000, but I’m not really sure at the moment. Since they’re coming out within the next 14 months, of course I’ve begun them and finished them. I pretty much do various minor rewrites until I absolutely have to turn a novel over to a publisher.

Bad Karma is a thriller (though, I find, with traces of the horror element). What was it like writing a book so different from your usual genre?

It was fun. I wrote it in under a month. It had a strong linear plot. I did it as a kind of experiment to see if I could write anything other than longer non-linear novels, and it was a bit of a success with readers, so I’m happy for that. It was also extremely short. I really wanted to see if I could work in other forms.

I know you never made your association with Bad Karma any particular secret, so just out of curiosity, why did you write it under the pseudonym of Andrew Harper?

Just so that the 70,000 or so readers per book that came to my other fiction would not think they were getting too similar an experience to the Clegg books. And because, I don’t know — I always wanted to have a pseudonym. I can name ten reasons, all of them frivolous.

Who is Andrew Harper (if he is anyone?)?

No idea. Me. Just a guy who writes. He actually has two other novels in a drawer, one a sequel to Bad Karma, and one, a gothic romantic thriller.

Do you plan any other work outside the horror genre?

Not at the moment, but I won’t rule it out. I read all kinds of genre fiction and would like to be published in various ways. But for better or worse, horror is my voice.

So what, exactly, is a gothic romantic thriller?

It’s something that’s close kin to anything by Daphne DuMaurier or Sandra Brown or even recent Nora Roberts novels. A woman is haunted by some event from the past. Love is heavily involved and cause for major motivation, and it’s emotionally or physically brutal, with at least the threat of violence if not the fact. Rebecca pretty much fits that, as does Unspeakable by Brown and River’s End by Roberts. Hitchcock films like Vertigo and Marnie also fit into that description: gothic romantic thriller, GRT. My book is called Tell Laura I Love Her, and it probably will sit in a drawer for awhile. It’s up to about 100,000 words in length, but not quite where I want it to be.

Which of your books would you like to see produced as a movie?

All of ’em.

Which actors/actresses would you like to see play the roles and why?

Never thought about this. I have no idea. Although I would love to see Jennifer Jason Leigh as Agnes Hatcher from Bad Karma. Mainly because she would make it work. Laura Dern might make it work, too. Not sure they’d want it!

Between 1991 and 1994 you took time off from your novels to concentrate on your short stories. Was this a reflection on your popularity — everyone suddenly wanted a short story from you — or more a case of feeling you needed a break from novel writing in general?

It was for a variety of reasons. One was my then publisher just forgot to schedule a book that was supposed to come out in ’92 or ’93. That was You Come When I Call You, which was finished then, although not in as good a shape as it is now (the additional years helped.) But, I also just began writing more and more short stories, and was working on The Children’s Hour, which came out in ’95. And two other novels which I haven’t really shown around yet (one, an all-out vampire novel, and the other, a novel called Therapy — although my current publisher was going to publish this, but we went with The Halloween Man instead.)

I would say I have ten horror novels in my head and on paper as works-in-progress at any point in time. It’s a matter of me scheduling them, and one novel taking precedence over all others for a time. So, there were two years when nothing came out in novel-form, but I was still writing books under contract then.

Which novel do you feel is your best?

Douglas Clegg: This is hard for me to say. You Come When I Call You, which comes out in limited edition in the late fall of ’99 and in paperback in the late spring of 2000, is my most risky and out there and has tortured me for a long time. This attaches me to it, and makes me hope it’s my best. Neverland is my favorite, because I think I captured something about what makes a horror writer as a child in it. But I like The Halloween Man a lot. Hell, I love em all, warts, boils, farts and burps. They’re my kids.

When you’re writing your novels do you manage to sleep with the lights off?

Oh yeah. I delight in writing these stories.

Are your characters or novels based around people you know or places you’ve visited? Would you go out of your way to visit somewhere to research it for a novel?

Yes, and I have visited places and researched. As short as Bad Karma is, I researched it over a two-year period at a hospital for the criminally insane. Most of my research involves what I’m already interested in, so it never feels like work.

I’ve been told that journalists learn never to be affected by writer’s block. Would you say this is the case for you? If not, are there any particular parts of writing which you get stuck on, e.g. love scenes, the final scene, etc. How do you deal with them?

Yep, I definitely don’t have writer’s block. I just write. Some days, it’s a good dose of prose, and some days, it’s just slow and dull and I know I have to rewrite later on. I just follow the story. I have found that when I get stuck, it’s because the book has gotten too boring even for me, so I go back and cut until I get to the interesting part. That always works.

Would you ever consider another career apart from writing (lounging in the Bahamas not included)?

Well, I edit and write. I’d consider another career if it made me this happy and fulfilled, but if I knew what it was, I’d already be doing it.

Could you tell the Crescent Blues readers who might not have read your books, about your novels and current projects?

A tall order. My horror fiction is pretty much entirely character-based, but it’s also supernatural in content. My upcoming short story collection, The Nightmare Chronicles (September ’99, in paperback) would be a good sampler for someone who wanted to try my fiction. Unfortunately, I have a hard time describing my fiction — I think it is what it is. I definitely believe in an old-fashioned sense of story, with beginning, middle, end, and I would not write a story unless I felt I could give a reader like me a real experience.

Apart from the novels you are currently writing (Naomi, etc.) do you have any particular long or short term goals?

Sure, but they’re all personal. My fiction is for the public and for myself. My long-term goals are just for me and my family. I want everyone I care for to be healthy and happy, and I want to build a nice house for my partner and myself, and I want to travel some more around the world and… But otherwise, I just want to get the world reading and communicating.

Is it true that most horror writers live in spooky houses with a host of cats, mad dogs and the statutory ghost, undead being or gargoyles?

Most horror writers are scary because they live completely ordinary lives. All their madness is in their fiction.

Is there anything you’d like to add? This is your soapbox.

I wish I had a soapbox. I take the long view of existence — nothing is awful as long as we just keep the planet in orbit.

Stephen Smith

Stephen Smith divides his talents between Webmastering, fiction writing and house keeping. Currently possessed by the Demon Comedic Muse, he is writing a comic fantasy entitled, Huw’s the Hero, an urban fantasy, vampire detective novel, Valencius Covers his Tracks. His science fiction romance Cyberius III was published in December 2005 by New Concepts Publishing under the pseudonym of S.J. Willing and he is working on the sequel, Poseidon VII. More information can be found at his normal website and at S.J. Willing’s webpage.