Slashers and Splatterpunks Read online

  Horror Convention in Phoenix, and pushed some of my work on

  him. Usually, this newbie tactic only provides a hungover literary

  hero something convenient onto which to scrawl groupie cell

  numbers and dry heave during a grueling afternoon reading.

  But my Skipp voodoo doll, while a lousy collaborator, wielded

  considerable power over the man himself, especially as he was at a

  crossroads in his own career, and particularly vulnerable to my

  psychic onslaught. (Saving a guy from choking to death on his own

  vomit thrice in a weekend counts for something, too.)

  Suffice to say, he read my work and thought it was worth talking

  about , and we gradually developed a mature working relationship

  based on mutual respect and an intriguing complement of skills and

  tastes... or so Mr. Skipp believes. Little does he realize that even his

  basic autonomic functions are controlled by a modified sewing

  machine pedal under my desk.

  JS: I would tell you what ACTUALLY happened, but Cody‘s

  batshit craziness is waaaaay more entertaining. So far as I can tell,

  the only true things he just said were ―Phoenix‖, ‗2004‖, ―World

  Horror Convention‖, and ―modified sewing machine pedal‖.

  But yeah, he stopped me as I was strolling through the convention

  grounds, and handed me something he‘d written. It was the

  prologue to Radiant Dawn, and it was fucking amazing. I actually

  read it on my way to and from my mother‘s funeral – which is a

  whole ‗nother story – and upon my return, I asked him for the

  books.

  At this point, he projectile-vomited nearly 20 feet – it was one of

  Slashers & Splatterpunks

  those Witches Of Eastwick moments – thoroughly dousing guest of honor Dee Snider with Tangaray, Gatorade, and semi-digested meatball chunks. Then we all went out for crackwhores and snacks. [laughs] And we‘ve been fast friends ever since.

  Incidentally, good luck finding a single scrap of facticity in ANY of this!

  Well, you did okay on that one, so here's another:

  Are you going to continue to work together? It sounds like it would be a great idea to me!

  CG: Until the wheels fall off, I expect... then we'll replace them with legs donated by our loyal fans. And lungs... please send lungs. JS: So far this year, we‘ve written Jake‘s Wake (the complete novel, and a new draft of script), a wild post-nuke novella, a short Hellboy story, and laid out the groundwork for the next six projects. So yeah, I‘d say we‘re gonna be at this for awhile.

  That is, of course, assuming that people send Cody their nice fresh luuuuuuuungs… [laughs] The pinker the better, I always say!

  When did you guys first decide you wanted to become writers? You know, who were your early influences? Now, now! Don't both jump at once! JS: Honestly? I think I‘ll just sit back and watch. This should take a while. [loads bowl, lights it]

  CG: One of my earliest memories is getting dragged out of a Santa's Village at the mall because I was making other kids cry. Telling them there was no Santa failed to elicit the necessary response, so I had to come up with something really awful that would come down your chimney, in lieu of presents. The result was kind of like Grampus, but made out of smegma.

  For as long as I can remember, I've always been an accomplished liar, and I have always enjoyed giving people bad news. I was given The Shining by my third grade teacher, and it was like a depth charge in my peanut-smooth, unformed brain. Lovecraft, Dick, Ellison and Barker informed my sense that real horror does not invade and wreak havoc upon picture-perfect small towns; real horror is a glimpse of the world, the universe, as it really is. Everything else I do well came from judicious cribbing from Soldier Of Fortune and late-night conversations with tweakers on Greyhound buses. I'm very attracted to works that not only combine genres, but use genre expectations against you. The best Weird Tales stories did this,

  Slashers & Splatterpunks

  and some dark fantasy, like Mieville and Gaiman, have perfected the technique. Even hardcore horror and very far-out fantasy caters to reader expectations with subtle nods to convention, so that readers can find their way through the story before their TV dinners burn or their laundry gets stolen. If you can anticipate where the jaded reader's trained mind expects you to go, you can twist the anticipation into slack-jawed awe and leave them naked in the dark, gnawing a petrified Hungry Man salisbury steak.

  JS [laughing]: It‘s true. I‘ve seen it. [lights bowl again] CG: It's kind of a mug's game, foisting fake bad news on people. Normal people don't enjoy being scared of shit, beyond the workaday stuff that's already eating them alive. Some writers have adapted by making the horror into fantasy (see your vampires question, below); we're trying to show readers how the mundane bad things they don't want to face grow and mutate behind their backs.

  John, did you want to answer that question? JS: There was a question?

  Never mind… What made you want to be a writer? JS: Dr. Seuss. He was my first major influence, the first creative artist I got really excited by. All the other children‘s books were condescending dogshit, but THAT guy knew how to entertain. He had incredible language skills, his art was fantastic and intricate and playful, his characters were iconic, his jokes were hilarious, and his stories had resonance that I felt in my bones, even as a tiny child. Yertle The Turtle? The Sneeches? Those were staggering fables that told deep human truths.

  Now that I think about it, the first two horror stories I ever read were Bartholomew and the Oobleck and that great one in the Yertle book about the haunted pants, with nobody inside ‗em. [laughs] At one point, I floated the idea of editing a ―Haunted Pants‖ anthology – you know, just fucking with people, since ―Haunted Airport‖ anthologies and ―Haunted Toaster Oven‖ anthologies were all the rage – and to this day, people ask me if I‘m still looking at haunted pants stories. ―I wish!‖ is what I say.

  Okay John, this one is for you only: Wasn't your and Craig's book The Light At The End about vampires? I know...dumb interviewer. In your

  Slashers & Splatterpunks

  opinion, do you feel that vampire fiction has grown kinda stale over the years? I mean, compared to the classics, Bram Stoker-esque fiction. Nowdays, you see it all: disco vampires, new-wave vampires, erotic vampires. It seems like a virtual bloodsucker renaissance.

  JS: Vampires are assholes.

  [long silence]

  That"s it?

  JS: Okay. Vampires are enormous assholes. That"s better.

  You will never catch me writing a vampire story in which the

  vampires are not enormous assholes. It just wouldn‘t feel right.

  Okay Cody, here's one for you only: Your two-part series of Lovecraftian

  horror, Radiant Dawn and Ravenous Dusk sound very interesting to say the

  least. What exactly are the books about?

  CG: I tried with these books, to pay back all of my influences

  the best way I knew how––by dismembering them, stitching their

  parts together and disguising the mess as a wholesome and safe

  technothriller. Since the tradition of Lovecraftian pastiche has

  ground on since before his corpse was cold, I wanted to draw in

  readers who would never knowingly touch the stuff, and make it

  scary again.

  Bluntly as I can, the books are about a war between humans and

  post-humans over the future of evolution. I used Lovecraft's

  cosmology as a backdrop, but the plot is entirely driven by human

  hubris: the unconscious choices we've made to derail or direct

  evolution, and the awful possibilities around the corner, when we

  wake up to the potential mutability of the biosphere, and really

  sta
rt fucking shit up.

  JS: Just to be absolutely clear on this: Radiant Dawn and

  Ravenous Dusk are masterpieces. I wrote essays on them long

  before Cody and I worked together, in Cemetery Dance magazine,

  trying to get everyone on Earth to read them, cuz they‘re that

  fucking good.

  Okay, another one for both of you: What would you say is your favorite horror film? How about book?

  CG: I WOULD say The Thing and Videodrome tag-team the top of my list. But the sad truth is, The Lost Continent and Gamera

  Slashers & Splatterpunks

  movies rule my miserable little world. My favorite book is a brutal cage match between John Shirley's Wetbones and Skipp & Spector's The Bridge. No wagering, please...

  JS: Dude, we would be here all day. Okay... Any short stories in the pipeline right now? I want one! CG: If you've already seen our first outing in Hellboy: Oddest Jobs, you'll have a bit to wait, but we're cooking up some ownage in a whole mess of media, including comics for the illiterate, and exclusively scratch & sniff stories for the blind.

  JS: [laughs] I can smell the suspense already! Okay, this is the last boring-assed question: In your personal opinion, do you think the online magazine will continue to flourish? I mean, my mag has only been around about five months, and I am interviewing you!

  CG: Yes, your downward spiral is a thing to behold, and we're happy to help... I'm afraid that, given the dwindling public interest in (and insane production costs of) print periodicals, online mags will have to adapt and take up the lead. I still prefer reading fiction on paper, and jealously hoard every scrap of fiction I read to cultivate a race of hyper-literate silverfish in my basement, but fluidity of the net makes it the best way to get news and visit with virtual shut-ins like ourselves... but good luck charging for it.

  JS: This is an online magazine? Yep! Well guys, it's been real! It was an honor to have you here, and you are welcome at my magazine anytime!

  { By the way; if you guys want to send me a free book, I

  want tell anybody. I promise! Really, you can TRUST me. And the check is in the mail, and I won't c………

  JS: [laughs] Kid, I used to make that promise. But it‘s hardly ever true. CG: If we can trust you to deliver a suitably orgasmic review (like entirely in vowels), then stay close to your mailbox. The mailman is sure to soil it...

  JS: Okay, we‘re outta here! Take care, young man!

  CG: Thanks for the great questions!

  No problem, guys! Any time.

  Slashers & Splatterpunks

  Craig Spector

  Slashers & Splatterpunks

  NVF Magazine Interview With

  Craig Spector

  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… everything

  was just a more… vivid… 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

  Slashers & Splatterpunks

  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 inthe-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 selfdesignated 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… 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

  Slashers & Splatterpunks

  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 hyperreality 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…

  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

  Slashers & Splatterpunks

  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.)