I had one of my dumb stories all prepared for the intro of this interview. One involving me and my poor choice of music to listen to when I sat down to read John Everson’s new book ‘Sacrifice’. Let me just tell you Lindsay Lohan does not go well with a crazed serial killer and the Curburide demons that prefer not only sacrifices, but sex and sacrifices. Just as I was settling into the book, and Lindsay was singing her heart out, ‘Sacrifice’ got a little too nasty for her cover of ‘At the Age of Seventeen’. However, I was too hooked and too horrified to turn off my Ipod. So Lindsay kept singing right through the corpse dismemberment and necrophilia, and it was John Everson who I felt just “took my innocence away.” Bet he never thought his book would end up being described with a Lindsay Lohan reference. Well welcome to my world. But let me take a step back for a minute. This is about John Everson’s world and the books he writes, which some of you may or may not have heard about, and that really bothers me. While I was reading ‘Sacrifice,’ I couldn’t stop thinking about all the fans out there who are really missing out.
It seems that the horror genre is split into two camps - avid fans of the films and avid fans of the literature. But why has no one bridged the gap? Most fans of horror films have rarely gone beyond the books of Steven King and the other top genre names. Yeah, they have probably read a few other lesser known books in their time, but many of them will go to the end of the earth and back for that obscure video release, totally oblivious to the fact that the same equivalent exists in horror literature. It’s called the small book press. Forced into limited print runs, the small book presses like Delirium are the Full Moon Studios and Shock-O-Rama’s (IE Entertianment) of the horror publishing world, giving new authors a chance and turning out great names like Liamo and Keene. Just like Full Moon or Troma has given certain big film stars their first break. Don’t believe me, I could be wrong, but just go to a horror message board and leave a post about a new book you’ve read and see how many responses you get. Now do it for a lesser-known movie and see how many you get for that. You can even take a look at the coverage on any horror website. You’ll be harder pressed to find news about the horror book world than you will be about the horror movie world.
So I saw my focus change during this interview. I want to concentrate on John Everson’s great new novel ‘Sacrifice’ (and I did), but I also want to see what “we” the horror fan could do to help bridge the gap. I want the “horror movie fan” to know that between those gore filled movie nights you can fill them in with gore filled reading. It’s all out there! Don’t wait until they make it a movie to see it, catch it while it’s a book. I just don’t recommend listening to Lindsay Lohan while doing it.
Horror Yearbook: You’re the second author we’ve interviewed who has won the Stoker Award (2005). Can you tell us about the award, what it’s for and how it felt to win it?
John Everson: The Bram Stoker Awards are given out every year by the Horror Writers Association to recognize top novels, short stories, anthologies, etc. in the field. The awards are voted on by your peers, which makes them a real honor to win – if your fellow horror writers think what you did is good, well, it seems like they would be the toughest fans to please! It was an amazing feeling to win the award. My book had the smallest distribution and print run on the final ballot, so I assumed I would lose just by virtue of the fact that not many people saw it. I flew out to Los Angeles to go to the ceremony anyway, just three weeks before my wife was due with our first child, so THAT was a little stressful too. But I wanted to be there, whether I won or not – the adage about it’s an honor to be nominated is really true here! And since I was going, I also was going to accept an award honoring my publisher as the Small Press of the Year, which Delirium had won. So I knew I’d be giving a speech one way or another! But when they announced the First Novel category was a tie…and there were only four of us on the ballot, my heart started beating double time sitting there at the table. I realized that I now had a 50/50 chance suddenly of winning …and a minute or two later, I found myself walking to the podium! It was very cool – and for weeks afterwards I had friends emailing me to congratulate me, and several Chicago newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune had reporters interview me. I’ve got video footage of me accepting the award and a bunch of newspaper clips about the award on my website here: www.johneverson.com/stokervid.htm and my “journal” of the event with photos is here: www.johneverson.com/stokers2005.htm.
HYB: Do you get to keep the little house they give you?
JE: Absolutely – the little door on the front opens, and within it is a plaque inscribed specifying that it’s for superior achievement in a first novel and includes my name and the name of the book, Covenant. It’s in my home office near my writing desk.
HYB: You won for your novel Covenant and you just released Sacrifice, which is the sequel to it. Can you tell us a little about Covenant and Sacrifice, and what they have to do with each other?
Covenant follows the story of Joe Kieran, a newspaper reporter who moves to the quiet coastal town of Terrel to escape the consequences of his exposes for a big city paper. But no place is safe from hidden secrets. Joe soon stumbles upon a web of mysterious teen suicides that somehow connect a ring of five women. Soon he finds that some believe there is a malevolent presence inside Terrel Cliff that holds all of the town in thrall. Is that the reason for the deaths, or is there a murderous covenant between five women to sacrifice their first-born? When a source is kidnapped right under his nose, Joe suspects that there is more at work in Terrel than a dark, tragic streak. Soon Joe finds himself trying to save both his source and a beautiful blonde girl from the demonic forces at work deep beneath the remains of a long-demolished lighthouse on a tragic cliff. And in his desperate bid to save the two women, he forges a new covenant, one that puts his own soul in deadly danger.
Sacrifice is up for pre-orders right now (Delirium Books sells out most of its short-run titles before they’re ever actually printed!) and will be available early next year. The novel picks up shortly after Covenant, and finds Joe on the run once again. It was fun for me to write because while Covenant all takes place in one town, Sacrifice is a travelogue of sorts…The characters are all on the road for much of the book, so I got to re-visit a lot of my favorite haunts in San Francisco, Austin, New Orleans, etc. Here’s the summary from the back of the book:
Ariana is on a killing spree. Dressed in a black vinyl catsuit, she lures men to hotel rooms, where they will leave their bodies behind—in multiple pieces. That’s the part of the story that the newspapers know. The “Sunday Slasher,” as she’s dubbed for her habit of leaving behind a corpse every Sunday morning, doesn’t just have a wealth of misanthropic bones in her body. She’s also got a hunger for ultimate power and control. Through ritual sexual sacrifice, she aims to open the door between this world and the domain of the powerful, but violently perverse Curburide demons. She will be their queen, and they will rape the world.
Joe Kieran is a young reporter who has just left the East Coast port town of Terrel with a demon on his back. Literally. Having forged a covenant with the demon, Malachai, to save the lives of two women, he now has a constant invisible companion, albeit one who is less than trustworthy. When Joe picks up Alex, a teen hitchhiker on her way to the Rocky Mountains, he soon finds that he’s been setup by Malachai. Alex is more than just a perky runaway; she has the ability to talk to ghosts, something her right-wing parents forced her to hide. But now she will need that talent more than ever; as Malachai sets them all on the path that can only lead to…Sacrifice.
The good thing about Sacrifice is that while it uses characters and situational history from the first book, it can easily be read without knowledge of Covenant…any background you need to know is included in the story.
HYB: Do you have plans to do more sequels to the Covenant or is Sacrifice the last one?
JE: There is a third book I’d like to do in this world, but at this point, I think I’d like to work on a novel that is separate from these characters before I go back to the world of Covenant.
HYB: Have you seen Renny Harlin’s movie with the same name (The Covenant)?
JE: Well – it’s not exactly the same. My titles doesn’t have a “The” ☺ But no, I haven’t seen the movie yet.
(You probably shouldn’t bother.)
HYB: What are you currently reading?
JE: Nothing at the moment…but I just finished proofing Edward Lee’s upcoming novel GAST for Camelot Books, which is probably Lee’s most sexually explicit book, and a rollercoaster ride of gore and perversion. It was great fun!
HYB: What are your influences, or the reasons, that got you started writing?
JE: I grew up reading science fiction and mysteries and occasionally some scary stories. I loved reading…and the adrenaline thrill of finding a ghost story book to order was something I always looked forward to when the Scholastic book catalogues came in grammar school. I guess later, when I started telling stories instead of just reading them, I wanted to give the same kind of feeling I got from fiction as a kid to other people.
HYB: Do you ever see yourself writing something outside the horror genre?
JE: I have written many things outside the genre, actually. In my “real” life, I write business non-fiction for a medical association, and for 18 years I’ve also penned a weekly pop music review column for Chicago’s Star Newspapers. In the fiction realm, I’ve written a dark fantasy novel for kids with goblins and witches and magic. Some of its sections have been previously published as short stories, though the novel hasn’t been purchased as a whole yet. And I’ve written lots of short stories that are straight fantasy, or science fiction with a slight dark twist, and even some erotica. I’ve not tried my hand at a police procedural or mystery…but I definitely write things that aren’t horror.
HYB: Do you like horror movies?
JE: I’m obsessed with them, (Laughs Out Loud). I always liked horror movies when I was a kid, but growing up, my parents didn’t want them on in the house so I only saw them on the sly. And my wife’s not a big fan, so for the first dozen years we were married, I really didn’t see that many at the theater, and we rarely rented VHS movies. But then about four years ago, I got a big screen TV AND a DVD player…and I started buying and stacking up DVDs of horror movies to have on hand when I had some free time. Then I decided to write a Halloween article for the newspaper I write for (I have written a pop music column for the past 18 years there). I thought it’d be cool to review a bunch of cult horror films on DVD. The ease of finding weird old films on DVD had really started to hit its peak then, and I thought it would be an interesting way to a) get some cool DVDs as a reviewer and b) see some stuff I normally wouldn’t make time for. I spent every weekend for a month immersing myself in a couple dozen DVDs various companies sent me…and I’ve not stopped a regular diet of horror DVDs since. Over the past four years, I’ve basically tried to make up for all the movies I didn’t see in the prior three decades! I’ve done a similar roundup article for the paper four years in a row now, and in between have gotten into the habit of watching a movie almost every weekend late at night on the big screen. I tend to pick up DVDs whenever I find them used at Blockbuster or cheap online, so with the dozens of reviewer films I’ve gotten over the past few years, I now have well over a couple hundred horror titles sitting around the house. (My wife is so proud.)
HYB: If so what are some of your favorites?
JE: I’ll always think of Alien and Terminator and Bladerunner as my favorite dark films, for mixing atmosphere and the science fiction I grew up on with horror. But over the past few years, I’ve found my tastes have centered largely on discovering European horror from the ‘70s. There’s a mood to those films (and often a schlock and sleaze factor) that just appeal to me. They’re “different” than watching an American film in an indefinable way. But I’ve now collected almost all of Italian Director Dario Argento’s films (faves include Phenomena and Inferno), and I also have been collecting French director Jean Rollin films the past couple years, which I love for their surreal stories, melancholic vampiric characters and mix of eroticism and horror. My faves of his are Living Dead Girl and Lips of Blood. I also have a couple Jess Franco’s erotic vampire films, but probably the most effective in that genre was Jose Ramon Larraz’s 1974 haunting British independent feature Vampyres. More recently, Mexican director Guillermo del Toro directed two great atmospheric horror films in Spanish, Chronos and The Devil’s Backbone that I can’t recommend enough. And for vein-spurting horror humor, it’s hard to beat Re-Animator, Dead Alive and Shaun of the Dead. Last year’s indie Dead and Breakfast was pretty fun too. Some of my other recent faves have been Session 9, The Others (Australia), the first two Ginger Snaps movies (Canada) and Uzumaki (Japan).
HYB: Can you tell us one of the 12-hedonistic perversions that the Curburide favor?
JE: Given Ariana’s sacrificial regimen, I think it’s safe to say that sex with a corpse while coated in the still-warm blood of the deceased is a top fave.
(Incase you have not been paying attention, the Curburide are the demons that Ariana, the serial killer in ‘Sacrifice’ is trying to raise. They just don’t require sacrifices but sexual sacrifices.)
HYB: How many novels have you written?
JE: Three in all – Covenant, Sacrifice and the unpublished YA book, The Goblin Wars.
HYB: If someone were going to read something of your’s for the first time, what story or book would you suggest they start with?
JE: Well…it depends on what kind of fiction they like really. I think my short story collection Vigilantes of Love is a good place to start – it’s a paperback, so it’s affordable (not too much of a risk!) and it has 15 stories that range from my more quiet urban fantasy, to a ghost story, a couple of holiday fantasies, and a couple of my more “Twilight Zone”-ish horror stories. My hardcover novelette Failure is a good place if you’re into more erotic horror…the small book centers around three teens who agree to have sex inside a pentagram to score some weed…but the conjurer who lures them there has more demonic plans than just to watch a sex show. And I have three stories that range from erotic horror to just creepy horror in a four-author anthology called Candy in the Dumpster that’s widely available and affordable, since it’s a paperback like Vigilantes.
HYB: Can we talk about the process of having one of your books published on a small press? Delirium has published 4 of your books, and its whole business model is producing limited edition signed books. So in the case of Sacrifice, it was available for preorder at around $50, and at this point has probably sold out. If it did sell out, will it ever be available through Delirium again? Do you feel this hurts you in any way since fans that cannot afford to buy $50 hardcover books miss out on your work?
JE: Well, obviously I’d like my work to be available to as many people as possible. But without small presses like Delirium Books (www.deliriumbooks.com), there are dozens of great horror authors who would not be published at all, because there are a very limited number of slots for horror on the New York publisher lists. So to have a book come out on a respected small press, even in a short run, helps to build a fan base and begin establishing a name for yourself in the field. Delirium was the first press that gave me a shot to move beyond simply publishing five or ten short stories a year in various genre magazines, which I’d done throughout the ‘90s. My collection, Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions came out in 2000 and was Delirium’s sixth book; it pulled together a lot of my erotic horror work from the previous 10 years. And putting all those stories together in one place in a book really helped people start to recognize my name, whereas before, they may have only remembered the gist of one of my stories that they’d come across in a magazine…but might not remember my name from amid the dozens of authors they saw in ‘zines. That book led to my next short story collection, Vigilantes of Love (Twilight Tales, 2003) which was done in a trade paperback format and is still available, so the fanbase I won with the first book could grow. And then when my first novel came out the next year from Delirium and won the Stoker Award… that generated a lot of interest in my work as well. My next book on Delirium was the novelette Failure, and that was issued in a 500-copy edition, so copies are still available.
So being on a small press hasn’t hurt me – it’s helped me to grow. I’ve been able to publish and build a small fan base, while also learning (I hope) how to mature as a writer.
HYB: But is there still a chance that a bigger publisher might release your book in paperback for a second printing?
JE: Absolutely. The good thing about having your book out as a limited edition hardcover is that there are New York mass market publishers that will still consider issuing a widespread paperback edition down the line, since very few people would have seen the first edition. Charlee Jacob, Gerard Houarner, Michael Laimo, Brian Keene and many others have all published small press hardcovers that later were released as mass market titles. And recently, W.D. Gagliani had his novel Wolftrap, which came out from a small press in trade paperback, re-issued by a major press in mass market paperback format. So just because your book comes out on a small press doesn’t mean its life is over. It may just be the beginning!
HYB: Of course I understand that having your book in print is better then not having it in print at all, but what can we, the fans, do to help make your books and others like them more accessible?
JE: Buy more horror books! There are a limited number of slots for horror novels from the major New York houses because over the past 10 years, horror novels have not sold well. Obviously there is a core group of horror fans who buy lots of books, which is why the small presses thrive in this genre. But at the supermarkets and Borders chains…horror hasn’t sold as well as romance, SF, fantasy, thrillers, etc. If more people bought horror books at the mass market level…more would be produced!
HYB: How many of your novels are published through Delirium?
JE: So far, Covenant and Sacrifice. Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions was a short story collection and Failure is a novelette (a very long short story published as a small hardcover book).
HYB: So if somebody wants to get a copy of Covenant they would have to get it on E-bay or Amazon now, correct?
JE: There are still copies available from Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com and Dark Delicacies,(www.darkdel.com).
HYB: Is it around the same price as when it came out?
JE: That depends on the seller.
(Sorry, dumb question.)
HYB: But some of your titles are still available through Delirium and other presses? Which ones?
JE: Failure is still available, and as of this moment, there are still copies of Sacrifice available for pre-order (and once it’s published, there will be some bookstores that have it available since they ordered it on pre-order to have inventory to sell. Vigilantes of Love is still in print from Twilight Tales (www.twilighttales.com) and on Amazon.com among other places. This year I also formed my own small press, Dark Arts Books, which will issue sampler anthologies of various authors’ work. Our first title was Candy in the Dumpster and includes three stories each from Jay Bonansinga, Bill Breedlove, Martin Mundt and myself. So that book is still available as well from, www.darkartsbooks.com
HYB: Do you already have plans for your next novel or is it too soon?
JE: I have a handful of ideas for novels I’d like to write, but I have a 15-month old son, so my writing time has been a little constricted this past year! For the past few months, I’ve spent my writing time producing some short stories for various anthologies, including one for a new Kolchak: The Night Stalker collection, as well as for a new short story collection of my own work that will be out next year from Necro Publications.
HYB: Have you ever thought of, or tried getting, your books published with a bigger publisher, or do you just strictly go through Delirium now?
JE: I’ve certainly submitted my books to many publishers and will continue to do so. Delirium’s a very supportive press – their goal is to both serve the horror collector market and expose some new authors who move on to “the big time” at mass market. And there are a couple of mass market publishers that are still considering releasing my novels. I hope they decide to do so!
HYB: HorrorYearbook.com started as an idea for a book and I spent 3 months trying to get our book published, any tips you can give me or other aspiring writers about the publishing industry?
JE: Write. And write more. The road to getting published is to continually generate new ideas and premises and to continually write new stories, hopefully with ever-increased skill. Ultimately, if you have the right idea and a good writing style and put those in front of the right editor at the right time…you’ll get signed! All of which says – your best chance to get published is to generate a lot of quality output, as well as a lot of submissions so that your output has a chance of being considered.
HYB: How long did it take you to get your first book published?
JE: Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions came together fairly quickly in one sense, but at the same time, it took 10 years. A couple of the stories included in it were originally written in the late ‘80s when I was in college. The rest were written in the ‘90s and most of them appeared in a variety of magazines like Grue, Terminal Fright, Bloodsongs, Crossroads, Dead of Night, Into the Darkness, and more. But I pitched the idea of compiling these as a book to Delirium at the end of 1999 and it was released on October 13, 2000. So it took less than a year from that standpoint from proposal to publishing for it to come out.
I spent several years working off-and-on to write Covenant, and Delirium read the original manuscript and offered to publish it in 2001, I believe. I tried for awhile to get it a mass market deal, and did some substantial rewriting on it in 2002-03 before deciding to move forward with Delirium’s offer in 2004. I’m still hopeful that a mass market version of the book will appear. There is currently a deal in the works to have the book translated into Polish for a paperback edition overseas. So next year there could be more copies of the book in Poland than in the U.S.!
HYB: Thank you very much John, you have been very helpful, informative and a pleasure to work with. It was a lot of fun and I look forward to reading more of your work. We also like to thank you for the oppurtunity to give one of our readers a chance to win a copy of ‘Candy in the Dumpster’.
At the beginning of this interview I wanted to know how we could make the wonderful world of horror literature more available to those who don’t really know about it or choose not take part in it. After this interview, I realized it’s authors like John Everson who love what they do, and take the time to share that with the fans, who will help to bridge that gap. The amount of time he spent with me for this interview just speaks volumes of his love of writing and for that I applaud him. I also urge you if you have never read any of his work to do so, you won’t be disapointed.
Being a part of HorrorYearbook.com has let me have the oppurtunity to meet a lot of horror authors and it has been an absolute pleasure. I have noticed that the majority of the horror lit world is very pleasant, loves the oppurtunity to speak about their work, and they are a very close knit community. It is an honor to sometimes be part of that world from time to time. I beg of you - if you’re not already a part of the horror litrature world, do yourself a favor and become part of it by picking up a copy of one of these books, joining these authors on My Space, and attending the many events they hold across the country. You’ll be glad you did!
Feel free to contact US at HorrorYearbook.com with any questions or suggestions where to get started, we are always glad to help.
You can check out more about John Everson at Johneverson.com or his My Space at www.myspace.com/johneverson
Also be sure and check out Delirium Books who have also been very helpful.
Some other places you can start:
Horror Writers Association
Hell Notes
Interview by WIL Keiper
Edited by Andrew Walsh
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