Q&A with MONSTER ISLAND’s David Wellington

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.

BOOKGASM: But do you agree that most people put their writing online because it is basically unpublishable? I’m wondering if you encountered some of that resistance when you were shopping the book around.

WELLINGTON: There’s definitely a sense people have that writing on the web is inferior compared to writing in print. It has more to do with the transient nature of the web than anything else, I think. A printed book is an artifact, a lasting presence in the world, while a web page can vanish in the time it takes an electron to pass through a logic gate. Also, anybody can put up a web page, but a printed book has to pass a series of tests – a publisher has to buy it, an editor has to clean it up.

As a genre writer, I’m kind of used to being pigeonholed, though, and it never really bothered me. When people hear I’m a writer, they tend to be impressed; when I tell them I write horror novels, they nod politely and then make an excuse to leave as soon as they can. It’s the same with the web: The reputation it has precedes it and almost never for the better.

BOOKGASM: How do bring something fresh and original to the zombie genre, especially when it hasn’t seen much innovation since George Romero turned it on its head nearly 40 years ago?

WELLINGTON: It’s part of my process, whenever I start a new project, that my first question is, what don’t I like about previous works in this category, or what did I like a lot but I felt like it wasn’t explored fully? So I start out trying to make something fresh. Why just retell a story you liked? You’re never going to top the original.

In this case I found myself asking, if anybody did survive the original zombie apocalypse, how are they going to make it long-term? Surrounded by monsters, unable to provide for themselves in urban desolation, what next? MONSTER ISLAND starts, quite intentionally, a month after the end of the world. That was something I hadn’t seen before.

It’s the same with my current book, THIRTEEN BULLETS. It’s a vampire story, and there’s a genre that’s been worked over every possible way, right? But there’s always something new to add, some new story to tell, or at least rehabilitate. THIRTEEN BULLETS is actually a throwback. Vampires have become so acceptable in our culture that these days they’re the heroes of romance novels. That bugged me. I remember reading DRACULA and actually being scared of the guy. I wanted him staked!

So I wrote my vampires as slavering demonic monsters who don’t want to have sex with you – they want to kill you and drink your blood. And that’s all. In the current environment, that’s new, and fresh, even though it’s really just getting back to basics.

BOOKGASM: As I stated in my review, the influence of your MFA degree shows in the writing. Were you writing horror for your master’s classes, and if so, what response did it get? I can see professors thumbing their nose at such a thing.

WELLINGTON: There was no interest whatsoever in my genre writing at my grad school workshops. They made it very clear when I first arrived that I was expected to write a certain style of academic fiction. It had to be dry and relatively free of affect, there could be no big dramatic moments – those were seen as tacky – and everything had to come strictly from personal experience.

For a long time, I struggled with that; I didn’t find their style interesting. I didn’t want to read it, and my first rule has always been that I only write things I would want to read. Then I made a decision: I would do it their way, but I would make it work anyway. I found that they would accept a certain degree of humor. I like to read humorous stories, regardless of the setting or genre. Now, I’m not a very funny guy, and I don’t write jokes well, but that just made it challenging. I wrote a couple of stories that were just hilarious. Then I threw together something for my thesis and graduated.

I don’t want to give people the wrong idea. I learned an enormous amount in grad school, largely because whenever you’re forced to do things in a way that is uncomfortable to you, you have no choice but to grow around the obstruction. I taught myself to write mainstream stuff – and then every night I would lock the door, close the blinds and write genre fiction in my spare time.

BOOKGASM: What is it about horror that makes it a field you enjoy working in? And what is it about horror that you don’t like to see other writers doing?

WELLINGTON: Horror is the most relevant genre right now. We’re living in a time when people are very much afraid, whether they’re afraid of terrorists or natural disasters or just the people around them. Talking and writing about fear is important right now. It’s also therapeutic. The reason why ghost stories have been with us for so very long now is because scary fiction is a great way to relieve real-world anxiety.

I doff my cap to anyone who has the energy and imagination to write a story or make a film or draw a comic book. I don’t turn my nose up at anyone who can tell a good story. There are things in horror I like more than others, however. I really dig monsters. Monsters are interesting characters because they are not noble and true and brave – but they’re not necessarily pure evil, either. I find stories about serial killers and knife-wielding slasher types to be boring, mostly, just as boring as tales about courageous cops and large-hearted heroes.

The best monsters – Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, George Romero’s zombies – have their own agendas. Their needs often set them at odds to conventional society, but they never kill or destroy just for the sake of furthering a plot.

BOOKGASM: After the MONSTER trilogy wraps up with MONSTER NATION and MONSTER PLANET, is that the end for you and zombies? What other projects do you have in the fire?

WELLINGTON: I’m writing a lot of zombie short stories, and hopefully there will be comic books and video games and all kinds of adaptations and enlargements of my zombie novels. I would gladly write more zombie books – I have fragmentary outlines for at least six more volumes – but for the moment I’m looking at other projects. I just finished THIRTEEN BULLETS, and up next is a story about werewolves. All of these books will be serialized on the web, for free, as long as I have something to say about it.

BOOKGASM: But if you plan on giving all your books away for free, does that limit their chances at hitting print, or do you think it helps to expand an audience that might otherwise not be aware of it?

WELLINGTON: I think it can only help me. We’ve definitely seen that’s true with MONSTER ISLAND. Most of the people who bought the book had never seen the website, but many of them bought it on the recommendations and reviews of people who had. The story of how the book went from web to print was one of the big selling points when dealing with both my publisher and the press. I got full-page features in both Rue Morgue and Fangoria magazines based on it. It’s also a great way to test-market my books, and make sure they work before they go to print.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Anyone who buys MONSTER ISLAND can e-mail David to receive a free MONSTER UNIVERSE e-book, containing more than 100 pages of new stories related to the novel, with some nifty illustrations.

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