Once you’ve polished off THE NEW WEIRD, editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer have another genre-defining anthology for you in STEAMPUNK. With such talents as Michael Chabon, Joe R. Lansdale and Michael Moorcock, the collection aims to present a snapshot of a speculative-fiction movement that marries the Victorian era with modern technology.

The merry, married VanderMeers talked to BOOKGASM about what steampunk – and STEAMPUNK, the book – is and is not (one thing it is: nicely discounted and autographed, if you preorder by May 15), and their very busy future.

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That Netflix queue pretty flaccid? In that case, we recommend consulting MR. SKIN’S SKINTASTIC VIDEO GUIDE: THE 501 GREATEST MOVIES FOR SEX AND NUDITY ON DVD. And there’s plenty more where that came from, as Mr. Skin – aka Jim McBride – dishes in this interview.

BOOKGASM: What kind of process was it with this book? Was this a case of having to narrow a list down to 501, or building up?

MR. SKIN: We have about 20,000 movies at mrskin.com. I’ve been running this website since 1999 and I always thought, you know, Roger Ebert has a video guide and Leonard Maltin has a video guide – I have to put out what I think is the best movies for sex and nudity on DVD. It took a while to narrow it down to, say, 1,000, then we had to go through all 1,000 movies, take a look at all the actresses who were naked – I don’t know if you noticed, but we added up the breasts, butts and everything – and that was a ton of work.

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Say hello to Joshua Jabcuga, the writer behind IDW Publishing’s four-issue SCARFACE: DEVIL IN DISGUISE miniseries, now available in trade paperback. Here, Jabcuga talks with BOOKGASM about adapting such an iconic character for the comics.

BOOKGASM: So how you begin tackle such a beloved property? Were you hesitant to even try?

JABCUGA: Hesitant? No. Nervous? Definitely. SCARFACE is a huge property, and I don’t have the luxury that, say, a film may have. If someone goes to see a movie, they pay their 10 bucks and typically sit through the entire film before forming an opinion.

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Honestly, Douglas Preston could not have picked a nicer day to come to Oklahoma City. In any other year, a mid-September morning here would be unbearably thick by breakfast, but blessed weather instead made it a cool, crisp, unnatural 66 degrees – granting us a perfect excuse to take a short walk from his hotel room to the Borders across the street for a friendly interview. On the way over, he admitted seeing his work on bookstore shelves doesn’t do anything for him anymore; though he’s still grateful, it’s become “old hat.”

Yes, BOOKGASM interviewed Preston before – just last summer, in fact – but with a new book in THE WHEEL OF DARKNESS comes a whole new set of questions, including ones on future projects. Get settled, folks – this one’s lengthy.

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In mid-April, Ted Dekker spent a day in Oklahoma City meeting area booksellers and pushing his latest thriller, SKIN – his first to land on the New York Times bestseller list. I met Dekker over lunch at OKC’s ever-popular Iron Starr Urban BBQ – he had ribs, I had a burger topped with chili and smoked sausage – and we talked about his rising career as a full-time novelist, particularly SKIN’s switch in bookstore placement from the Christian fiction shelf to the one for all mainstream thrillers. The following represents just a few choice passages from more than an hour of conversation.

BOOKGASM: The first thing I wanted to ask you is if SKIN’s move away from the evangelical was deliberate. Because I noticed it.

DEKKER: The only difference between SKIN and some of my other novels is that the subject matter is more general: truth and beauty. SKIN is more of a straightforward thriller. It has no Christianity in it at all, but neither do some of my other novels. That’s kind of how my novels are and that’s how they’ll be stocked from now on. All will be sold and marketed in Christian bookstores, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders.

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Jon Courtenay Grimwood burst onto the science fiction scene 10 years ago with NEOADDIX and has defined the leading edge of speculative fiction since then, with books including REMIX, REDROBE, the ARABESK trilogy and STAMPING BUTTERFLIES. His latest U.S. release, 9TAIL FOX, is a noir tale about a San Francisco policeman who must solve his own murder.

BOOKGASM: Anyone can read a summary for 9TAIL FOX on the back of the book or on Amazon. But what kind of book did you set out to write, and was that what you ended up with?

GRIMWOOD: 9TAIL FOX was my sanity book. After nine strands across three timelines in STAMPING BUTTERFLIES, I wanted to write a fast-moving novel, told from one person’s POV, with a beginning, middle and end, all action taking place over a short time. I wanted to do it with almost no flashbacks, while framing the lot within the structure of a crime novel. 9TAIL FOX was the result.

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Over in Florida, author Gary Williams has managed to create an Internet buzz and build a loyal fanbase without the benefit of a high-dollar marketing budget, much less a publisher. He did this by … well, here, let him tell you about it.

BOOKGASM: For those unfamiliar, how would you describe what your novels are all about? To whom would they appeal?

WILLIAMS: The first three books – FISH OF SOULS, GROUNDSWELL and THE GOD TOOLS - are supernatural thrillers. My upcoming novel, HALF-RED SKULL is a pure thriller. I will admit my work carries a distinctive horror flavor, which I attribute to my love of early Stephen King novels.

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These days, Greg Cox is busy playing with comic-book characters. For instance, he wrote the GHOST RIDER novelization, as well as adapted DC’s far-reaching event series INFINITE CRISIS into a novel. Next up is a similar treatment for the company’s year-long, weekly serialized experiment 52. So, why novelizations? Cox stopped typing long enough to let us know.

BOOKGASM: Novelizations are almost like their own genre. In your experience, who’s reading them?

COX: I think the readers fall into two categories: the ones who can’t wait for the movie to come out and need to know what the movie’s about right now, and the ones who can’t get enough of the movie and want to experience it in a different format. I’ve heard from one fan who has already read GHOST RIDER twice!

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Former model Amanda Kerlin dishes on the fashion industry in her debut novel, SECRETS OF THE MODEL DORM, co-written with Phil Oh. Here, Kerlin jumps from the catwalk to talk with BOOKGASM about the fictional exposé – your basic field day of sex, drugs and haute couture.

BOOKGASM: How you decide to go from “I lived this” to “I need to write about this”?

KERLIN: It was always something we joked about while we lived in the model dorm – “Oh, we totally have to write a book about this” – but it wasn’t until a year later that I guess the stars were aligned and we both had a bit of free time on our hands. And the success of shows like AMERICA’S NEXT TOP MODEL, 8TH & OCEAN, PROJECT RUNWAY, etc., inspired us to get off our asses and strike while the irons were still hot.

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Yes, some people do read PLAYBOY magazine, and one of its signature text features – month in, month out – is “The Playboy Advisor,” the monthly advice column on sex and other things that stimulate a man’s fancy, from expensive electronics to grooming habits and everything (and everyone) in between. Some of the best letters from the last dozen years now have been collected by Chip Rowe – Mr. Advisor himself – in Playboy Press’ DEAR PLAYBOY ADVISOR: QUESTIONS FROM MEN AND WOMEN TO THE ADVICE COLUMN OF PLAYBOY MAGAZINE, a long title which renders my introduction redundant. Regardless, Rowe put up with a few questions from BOOKGASM about his helpful compendium.

BOOKGASM: What’s a typical day like for the Playboy Advisor?

ROWE: I don’t have any typical days, believe me. That’s why I’ve been able to do it for 12 years. We receive about 700 letters a month. My right‑hand man Mike Ostrowski and I try to answer each one with a personal response or form letter. Then I select 15 or 20 to answer in more depth in the magazine. I’m always afraid I will have already answered every question, but the readers never fail to surprise me.

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For regular BOOKGASM readers, it’s no newsflash that we’re in love with Paul Malmont’s debut novel, THE CHINATOWN DEATH CLOUD PERIL. Seriously, three of us among our small staff already have read it, gone nuts over it, and we don’t agree on anything. It’s a thrilling literary adventure starring Lester Dent and Walter Gibson, the real-life creative forces behind pulp heroes Doc Savage and The Shadow. Malmont’s creative, too – not just as a novelist, but in his day job as a copy director for an online media advertising firm. Who knows what lurks in the heart of Malmont? We do, now that we’ve talked to him about the book’s genesis and his plans for the future. And now you will, too…

BOOKGASM: Why these characters and why this story?

MALMONT: I’ve always found stories that mixed the real and the unreal fascinating, that take the real and fictionalize it. Like the movie TIME AFTER TIME, where H.G. Wells becomes a time traveler? That was a wonderful story and invention, and I’m fond of that kind of storytelling.

So in the proud tradition of it – or as The New York Times said, “literary cannibalization” – I had come to thinking I wanted to tell a story about Lester Dent and Doc Savage. But I realized I couldn’t tell that story without including Walter Gibson’s story, because there was a whole “white and dark” thing going on there between them. Then I read one of Isaac Asimov’s many autobiographies, and he mentioned he knew L. Ron Hubbard in the pulp scene. I thought, “That’s it! L. Ron Hubbard is the missing ingredient, the X factor. He makes it all come together.”

I didn’t want to tell a flat-out pulp story, but I wanted to capture the experience of reading the pulps in a more adult, literary way. I also wanted to capture that promise of the pulps. When I was reading Bantam’s Doc Savage reissues, I’d look at the cover and think, “Oh, this is the one that’s going to blow my mind!” And then you read them – and they’re fun, don’t get me wrong – but the formula shows through pretty quickly. So I wanted to write that one pulp that the cover always promised. I just couldn’t use the conventions of the pulp stories to tell a story about their conventions.

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With writing partner Lincoln Child, Douglas Preston is a New York Times bestselling author on a string of thrillers, most recently with the new THE BOOK OF THE DEAD, the conclusion to a trilogy of novels that began with BRIMSTONE and DANCE OF DEATH, all showcasing their popular FBI Agent Pendergast character. In this conversation with BOOKGASM, Preston talks about what’s in store for that character, for future books (with and without Child) and – fingers crossed, folks – for the silver screen.

BOOKGASM: How would you characterize your working relationship with Lincoln Child? What is it that makes what the two of you guys do something that lots of people can’t wait to read?

PRESTON: I think that book writing partnerships are often extremely difficult and fraught with problems. I’ve seen many of them fail. But Lincoln and I, we both have similarly twisted minds. We both see the world in the same way, and have absolute faith and trust in each other’s judgment. I can write the most perfect turn of phrase, so good it’s Shakespearean, and I can think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, and Lincoln will say, “That stinks,” and cut it out. And I’ll be heartbroken, but I trust him, and it works vice versa.

BOOKGASM: So who has the final say?

PRESTON: Neither one of us has the final say. When we’ve found ourselves at loggerheads, which happened early on, when we were both absolutely unyielding in our beliefs, we said, “There’s obviously a problem with both our approaches, so let’s throw them both out and find a third way.” And that third way has always worked better.

I think it was the writer Lawrence Block who said you have to learn to massacre your little darlings in order to become a good writer. And by “little darlings,” he means those paragraphs of purple prose so exquisite that it pains you to cut. And that’s what Lincoln does for me and I do for him. We massacre each other’s little darlings.

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Zombie aficionados should get their dirty hands on a copy of David Wellington’s epic MONSTER ISLAND now, before the world ends. In the meantime, learn how this Little Web Serial That Could made it from screen to paper, and what horrors its author has in store for your bleak future.

BOOKGASM: Your “how I got published” story is vastly different from most authors since MONSTER ISLAND began as a serial available on the Internet for free. Talk about why you chose that route, and the transition it took from the web to something you can hold in your hands.

WELLINGTON: My book started out as a dare, really. A friend of mine had a website. I wanted to write a book and didn’t know what to do with it. He suggested I put it on his website where at least people would read it. His site was a blog, and he wanted me to serialize the book as a sequence of blog posts, an idea we discarded almost immediately. I would write a chapter and post it every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I said that was fine – I’ve always written fast, and figured I could keep to that schedule. I asked for six months to research it and work up an outline but he said no, if we were going to do this, I had to start the next day.

It was a challenge and I thought it would be fun. It turned out to be an astonishing amount of work. I had to do research in the middle of writing a sentence; I would have Microsoft Word open in one window and a Somali language website open in another. I’ve never worked like that before. The serial form, however, and the kind of energetic style it requires, really seemed to work. People started reading my chapters, and commenting on them, and linking to them. By word of mouth, we developed a readership far faster than I would have considered possible. Eventually I started getting reviews online, first reviews of the website, then reviews of the story as a book. People started asking, “Why isn’t this a print novel?” Eventually somebody who had the power to make it happen asked that question, and here we are.

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Any American who’s attended mainstream church services knows all about hymnal singing, water dunking and wafer eating. But what goes down when Satanists and Scientologists meet? J.C. Hallman’s new non-fiction book THE DEVIL IS A GENTLEMAN: EXPLORING AMERICA’S RELIGIOUS FRINGE – read our review here – explores this very topic, as Hallman researched firsthand.

The author of the acclaimed – yet criminally underread – THE CHESS ARTIST: GENIUS, OBSESSION, AND THE WORLD’S OLDEST GAME, journalist Hallman sheds a little more light on his subjects in this quick Q&A with BOOKGASM.

BOOKGASM: How did you select which religious fringes to cover, and were there any that had to be cut for whatever reason?

HALLMAN: First off, let me say thanks to BOOKGASM and its readers. Literary weblogs are performing a very important function right now in the whole business of books, and I’m flattered to have been granted this forum. It’s nice to know there’s an audience out there that isn’t concerned, first and foremost, with bottom lines.

The thing with writing about religion, I think, is that it’s impossible to be comprehensive. You can read and write your whole life and barely scratch the surface of the subject. When I began to compile a list of groups to investigate, I followed a couple of rules: They had to speak to something inherently American, and they had to have emerged in the 20th century. Now, I broke these rules to some extent, but what was more important than the basic facts of any particular group was coming up with a collection that was, at least on some level, representative of something. You can’t be comprehensive, but you can at least aspire to representation. I went with a couple Christian groups, a couple Pagan groups, a few that seemed to have sprung out of nothing at all, and Atheism to round things out. Together, they made a portrait that felt accurate to me.

No group was cut, but I did abandon the investigation of a couple – snake handlers and the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship – because I felt I already had a fair handle on the Christian side of things. If you’re in the ring with the Christian Wrestling Federation, do you have to take up a serpent, too, to understand the Christian fringe?

BOOKGASM: You remark several times about being spooked, but at any point, did your “fight or flight” instinct kick in and tell you, “I should not be here. I should not be doing this”?

HALLMAN: There were definitely a few moments when things felt sketchy – such as sneaking onto the razed foundation of the house where the Heaven’s Gate members killed themselves, or finding myself in a Satanic dungeon in remote Canada – but the only time I really felt like I was doing something I didn’t want to do was in Scientology. I was attending L. Ron Hubbard’s birthday celebration in Los Angeles. It wasn’t that it scared me; it was just kind of gross. It was religion as the Oscars, and that ceremony had just taken place not that far away. About halfway through the celebration, I wanted to leave – I wasn’t interested, it wasn’t moving in any way – so I did. That’s how I ended the Scientology section of the book.

BOOKGASM: What do you think it is that people find attractive about these groups that you and I and the majority of our nation sees as utterly strange?

HALLMAN: It’s pretty easy to take pot shots at groups like this. They’re routinely mocked. And they are pretty strange, there’s no doubt about it. But one of the jobs I sort of set for myself in this book, one of the ideas I had, was that I would spend at least a little time in each chapter trying to portray ceremonies or observances in such a way that you, as the reader, would get a sense of just this question. What’s attractive about them? How do these people understand themselves? Sometimes it’s the very otherness of a religion that draws people.

THE DEVIL IS A GENTLEMAN spends a good amount of time on the life and work of William James, whose THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE answered this question for a different century. One of the things that James said is that people are drawn to the religions that are in keeping with their “personal susceptibilities.” If you feel left out of culture, you’ll find a religion that speaks to that. The utter strangeness of a belief is precisely the thing that folks like this respond to – they don’t join in spite of it, but because of it. People come in varieties – that’s why there are a variety of religions. I kept that idea in mind throughout the work on this book.

BOOKGASM: Have you been harassed by any of the more suspect groups since the book came out?

HALLMAN: Not yet, but the book’s just coming out. Check back with me in a couple months – if I don’t respond, call my editor. He knows what to do.

BOOKGASM: What’s next from you?

HALLMAN: I’m working on an article about Pleistocene rewilding for Harper’s Magazine. It’s possible that a book may spin off from that.

Buy it at Amazon.
Discuss it in our forums.

One of the better thrillers we’ve read in the first quarter of 2006 has been Tim Downs’ virus-laden PLAGUEMAKER, which we reviewed here. To shed a little more light on this underrated title, Downs answers a few questions.

BOOKGASM: There’s a lot going on in this book. But what would you say is at the root of PLAGUEMAKER?

DOWNS: The story is ostensibly about bioterrorism: a terrorist’s attempt to attack New York City with genetically altered bubonic plague and the FBI’s attempt to stop him. But the underlying story is about two old men who each have an old score to settle. Each man takes a different path to his goal: One man takes the path of bitterness and vengeance, while the other man takes the path of forgiveness. That’s what the story is really about: forgiveness.

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Allen C. Kupfer’s THE JOURNAL OF PROFESSOR ABRAHAM VAN HELSING is one of the latest pieces of vampire fiction to use Bram Stoker’s classic as a springboard. We spoke with Kupfer – also the co-author of the current mystery A MEAL TO DIE FOR – about his contribution to literature featuring those creatures of the night.

BOOKGASM: Your book is among many that have spun off of Bram Stoker’s original DRACULA novel. What is it about that work that allows it to have so much influence after all these decades?

KUPFER: DRACULA is a book primarily about the title vampire and the battle to stop him, but it’s a rich novel on so many levels. One can read it as a novel about sexually transmitted diseases, about nationalism, about fear of foreigners, about repressed female sexuality, about the power of faith, about so many things. It’s so much more than your run-of-the mill horror novel. And think about how many novels and films have taken one or more of the the themes I’ve just mentioned and have run with it/them. And then there’s the ever-popular appeal of the vampire as a “monster.”

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Few horror novels provoke the kind of response as J.F. Gonzalez’s SURVIVOR. About a woman who finds herself the victim of a kidnapping – and subsequently the planned star of a snuff film – the book never flinches. (You can read our review here.) We talked to Gonzalez about the dark origins of his pitch-black plot.

BOOKGASM: You’ve said that the road rage incident which opens the book was based upon an event that happened to you. But where did the inspiration for the snuff-film element come from, and what gave you the idea to connect one to the other?

GONZALEZ: I’d been trying to write a story loosely based on that incident for a few years and nothing was working. Then one afternoon I was watching the news, kind of daydreaming about my work while watching it, which a lot of writers do, and there was a news story about a pornographer being brought up on animal cruelty charges for making crush videos. Crush videos are S&M-tinged films where women wearing spiked heels torture and kill small animals by stomping on them. One of the videos found reportedly contained footage of this same woman stomping on a doll, which suggested the torture and murder of a human infant. As I watched this, I couldn’t help but think that if there were weirdos out there who got off on this stuff, there had to be a few even sicker weirdos who would get off on the real thing. And that scared the living shit out of me.

I was thinking about my road rage story when this news item came on, and all of a sudden, the basic seed kind of sprang from that. That’s
basically how they became connected to one another.

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Here at BOOKGASM, it’s no secret that we love the Hard Case Crime series. Seeing that cool yellow-ribbon logo is like paperback crack. In between issuing monthly editions, series editor Charles Ardai talked to us about the line’s genesis and its future.

BOOKGASM: As the sole editor for Hard Case Crime, what is the selection process like when choosing novels for publication? Have there been any older titles you wanted to acquire for reprint, but were unable to?

ARDAI: It’s very simple: I buy novels I love. Nothing could be easier. For the reprint side of the line, I go to my bookshelves and the thousands of paperback crime novels I have there, and I pick out the ones I remember being blown away by when I read them. I also get recommendations over the transom from our readers, and have a pile of several dozen books on my to-be-read pile at any given time.

For original novels, the process is different, but the criteria are the same: We’ll only buy a book if we love it, if it tells a remarkable story in a remarkable way. We get about 1,000 submissions per year, mostly by e-mail, and I read as much of each as I need to in order to tell whether it’s good enough and interesting enough for us to publish. The simplest way to describe my selection process is this: If I can stop reading, I do; if I can’t, we buy it.

Since we only publish between four and six original titles each year, we have to say “no” to more than 99 percent of the books we receive; the positive way of looking at that is that we have the opportunity to hold out for those rare few that are really irresistible.

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Though best known for the graphic novel ROAD TO PERDITION – a work that spurred the Oscar-winning Tom Hanks film as well as prose sequels, including the just-released ROAD TO PARADISE – Max Allan Collins has his hands in everything, from novels and comics to short stories and games and film projects. Nonetheless, the very busy mystery writer took a short break to talk to us.

BOOKGASM: Now that your ROAD series is complete, do you greet the end with relief or regret? When you sat down to write that first graphic novel, did you ever think your creations would end up at the Academy Awards?

COLLINS: The trilogy is complete, though frankly, I don’t view this as a series – more of a family saga. A series wouldn’t have its protagonist age 30 years between entries. If the public and I decide it’s worthwhile, I might in the future revisit the O’Sullivan saga. Whether Michael’s son died in Vietnam or not is as yet an unanswered question. Also, Hollywood folks have recently inquired about my doing a prequel taking place perhaps 10 years before ROAD TO PERDITION, starting with Michael Sr. in World War I and exploring the beginnings of his relationship with John Looney, and a surrogate brother one with Connor.

Unlike a lot of writers, I am inclined toward sequels – I like to check back in on characters. Next summer, Hard Case Crime will bring out my novel THE LAST QUARRY, which is about my hitman character who appeared in four ’70s novels and one ’80s one. As for imagining Academy Awards, I often think a book or graphic novel has movie potential, particularly since over the last 10 years I’ve become an indie filmmaker here in the Midwest. At the end of January, Koch will be bringing out my BLACK BOX, a collection of three features, a documentary and several short films.

PERDITION always struck me as having sequel potential, and that was in the mix from the beginning – and the graphic novel made it an obvious Hollywood point of interest – though frankly, I figured it would make a John Woo picture starring some second-string action hero.

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Ray Morton began his Hollywood career as a screenwriter, leading to his current day job as a story consultant and script analyst, as well as senior writer and columnist for Scr(i)pt magazine. But if you’ve visited a bookstore lately (or read the BOOKGASM review), you may recognize him as the author of KING KONG: THE HISTORY OF A MOVIE ICON FROM FAY WRAY TO PETER JACKSON, an instantly essential guide to the entire KONG franchise, authorized and otherwise.

As Jackson’s current remake continues to pummel (most of) the competition in theaters, Morton shared his thoughts on that film, its classic original and, of course, his book with us. And now, through the magic of the Internet, with you…

BOOKGASM: Why a whole book about KING KONG? What does the original film mean to you?

MORTON: I first saw the film when I was 8 and was tremendously affected by it. To begin with, I was fascinated by the whole story – a journey to a mysterious island; a strange tribe of natives offering a human sacrifice; a population of monstrous dinosaurs in a prehistoric, fog-enshrouded jungle – all of these things were tremendously fascinating to my 8-year-old mind. But I was most fascinated with Kong himself – I loved gorillas and the idea of a giant one was just enthralling. The scenes of him running amok in New York City were completely captivating to me, especially since I was from there. The Empire State Building sequence blew my mind. I had simply never seen anything like that before. Ultimately, though, I was very moved by the story.

Although I’m sure I didn’t grasp all the subtleties of the piece at the time, in the end I knew Kong was doing all of what he was doing because he liked Ann and that this is what got him killed, and I found myself crying at the sadness and the injustice of that. All of those feelings have stayed with me ever since. Whenever I watch the film, I am transported back to the 8-year-old boy that I was and I experience all of those feelings all over again.

Later on, as I learned about how films were made and especially how KONG itself was made, I came to appreciate just what an innovative and effective piece of filmmaking that it is, and I am able to enjoy it on that level as well everytime I see it.

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