This is a great video. Totally worth watching. And yet what’s frightening is that this is 2 years old!

Random Rant going on here. Take from it what you will. The video from BookNet Canada’s 2010 Tech Forum where Kobo’s Michael Tamblyn presents “Lessons Learned from Shortcovers and Kobo: A Year in the Life of the What and How of Selling eBooks” is not new to most people in the publishing industry. There were some great lessons learned and I took a lot from the presentation. It’s well worth the 50 minutes and I’ve posted it here if you haven’t seen it. I was especially interested in the pieces around ebook pricing. One of the things that’s been on my mind since the advent of the iPad is the new pricing arrangement that publishers set up with Apple, or perhaps, what Apple set up with publishers. Those of us in the industry know it as the “agency model”. Publishers can sell ebooks at their preferred price and Apple simply takes 30% for making it available in their iBookstore. Publishers, agents, and authors all lauded this new model. Then publishers turned their gaze towards Amazon and forced them to take on a similar model. Prior to this Amazon had been using the “wholesale model”, where Amazon purchased the book from publishers and sold ebooks at whatever price they wanted. During the time that Amazon was using the “wholesale model” they were selling ebooks at no more than $9.99, and often at a loss. Their take, I assume, was that if ebooks were cheap more people would buy their e-reader, the Kindle. I get that argument. And quite honestly, if I’m going to spend a nice amount of money on an e-reader, the books shouldn’t cost the same as paper. They should be considerably cheaper. I had the same feeling about mp3’s and CD’s. If I am going to buy an mp3 it better be really cheap since I’m not buying all that packaging. Sadly, the music industry learned that lesson the hard way. So here we are today. Apple and Amazon are now selling ebooks using an agency model and if you look, you’ll find some paper books cheaper at Amazon than their respective ebook format. That’s a sore point with a lot of readers. So that brings me to this post. When folks in the industry were applauding the agency model of business saying this is good for authors, publishers and agents, nowhere did I hear anyone saying that this was good for the consumer. And quite frankly, as a consumer myself, it’s a little insulting. And at the end of the day, publishers are going to learn this lesson the hard way, just like the music industry did. As a result of all of this I decided to run my own poll around what was a factor for buying books. Surprisingly, price ranked third, tied with the author. Certainly something for publishers to consider, especially since their own “brand” is at the bottom of the list. Now, let’s move on to Digital Rights Management (DRM) since that comes up quite frequently around ebooks these days. DRM was something the music industry tried to implement and it failed miserably. Consumers don’t want something that limits their ability with something they own. I find that when it comes to consumers, their attitude is that if they paid for it with their hard-earned money, they own it. They can do what they want with it – end of discussion. DRM basically tells them they don’t own it and that they are limited in what they can do with it. So when it comes to books, when you buy an ebook that has DRM, the following will happen: - if you move from a Kindle to the Sony, you have to buy the book again. You don’t have the right to move from one platform to another. - if formats change in a few years and you want that book on some new e-reader, you need to buy it again. There’s a whole lot more, but what I’m trying to illustrate is that you technically don’t own it any more. Unlike a paper book, you can’t lend it, you can’t resell it, you can’t keep it for 20 years because no technology platform will last that long. Basically you’ve licensed the use of it for the life of the device that you’ve got in your hands right now. When you move to some other platform, that’s it. Bye bye book. And that’s just want publishers want. Buy, buy book. There have been a number of arguments around DRM and the protection against piracy, but you know what? They’re wrong. DRM doesn’t protect anything. There is, and there will always be, someone who will hack it. And they will do it because you’ve given them the challenge. And whether an ebook has DRM or not, those consumers that are determined not to pay for content, will find it free no matter what. So now the choice needs to be focused on the consumers that are not quite so willing to venture into the Darknet to get their content “illegally”. How can you keep customers buying instead of looking for your ebook for free? Make it cheap, make it easily accessible, and make it theirs. Let them do what they want with it once they’ve paid for it. It’s their perception that they own it, and they’re right. I ran a couple of polls over the last few weeks to get some feedback from readers. They are completely unscientific, but the results are below.

Not only do readers prefer their books without DRM, but 26% of the readers who took this poll won’t even buy an ebook if it has DRM. That’s significant. The next two polls were on pricing. Because the respondents were from around the world, I couldn’t price things in US dollars. So I used a pricing structure relative to the cost of a trade paperback book. The first poll is what readers were willing to pay for an ebook if it had DRM. Most people were willing to buy the book at 50%-75% of trade paperback price if it had DRM. But again, 25% of the respondents would not buy the book at all.

In the last poll I removed DRM to see if the attitude would change when there was no DRM in place. The majority of respondents were willing to pay 50%-100% of trade paperback prices if there was no DRM. This is a huge signal to publishers that they should rethink some of their strategy.

I wish Kobo had done some more research around DRM. My own polls are obviously limited, but I think they say something about the reading public and the publishing industry needs to pay attention to what they’re saying. There have been a number of complaints at places like the Amazon Kindle discussion groups and mobileread.com where consumers with e-readers gather en masse. Publishers need to drop in and listen to what their readers are saying.

In the meantime, go check out places like Smashwords. Their books are DRM-free. Once you buy the book, you can download it over and over again. And if you change devices, you can download it in the format for your new device without hassle and free of charge. And most of the books there are cheap. This is where ebooks should be. Rant finished.

Although I can’t say I agree with all of the PSA’s fatherhood.org has put out, these I found particularly meaningful. Enjoy.

More on this later. Quite interesting!

Over at Permuted Press, they’re releasing some great new books, especially some dark, apocalyptic fiction. I’m going to be doing some interviews with a few of the authors/editors there so I hope you’ll take the time to check out their work. Last week I interviewed author, Kim Paffenroth. Today, please welcome author, Brian Easton.

————

To start, can you tell me a little about yourself?

Well, I'm originally from a small town in southern Illinois. My father was a minister, as was my grandfather, my brother, two uncles and two cousins – this is my pedigree. My exposure to spirituality and faith-based phenomena cultivated a lifelong interest in the religious systems of the world, but it was the occult that I've spent more time studying than anything. In 1984 I began a research campaign into the occult, and majored in socio-cultural anthropology to that end. I'm also obliged to tell you, lest anyone think I've spent my life with my nose in a book, that I've trapped wild boar in Tennessee for the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, been a cowboy in Wyoming's Bighorn Mountains, and worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad across Colorado and Utah.

How long have you been writing and how did you get to this point in your career?

My mother gave me her old manual Royal typewriter when I was about ten years old. I immediately tore out a piece of spiral bound notebook paper and wrote my first story on it. I was a "monster kid" in the 70's. I loved the Wolf Man and Frankenstein and the Mummy, so that's what I wrote about. Oh, and I made whole typewritten comic books of my own super heroes.

In my twenties I decided to compile a bunch of my short stories into a three-ring binder. I cleaned them up, filled in the gaps and called it a book. By the time I was 30 years-old I'd written six manuscripts with the same characters and ongoing story. I sent some of them to random publishers, not knowing then what we all know now, that publishers ignore unsolicited manuscripts. It wasn't until 1999 that my girlfriend (now my wife) encouraged me to get serious about my writing. She introduced me to Print-on-Demand Publishing. The costs were minimal compared to what I'd seen from vanity presses, and I thought that if I could just get my stuff out there maybe a publisher would notice me and offer to take me on. I ended up self-publishing two novels, first in 2003 and again in 2008, and they both won Independent Publisher awards. Last year Permuted Press contacted me and offered me a contract for both books, so I guess the plan paid off.

You have a new book coming out, Autobiography of a Werewolf Hunter. Tell me what inspired you to write this?

Autobiography is the first book I was telling you about, except it used to be called: When the Autumn Moon is Bright. Remember those homemade comic books I mentioned? One of them featured two monster-hunting superheroes, a werewolf hunter and vampire killer. I've always been infatuated with werewolves, so I think it was only natural that I developed the Werewolf Stalker character. He became Sylvester Logan James, the central figure of both books.

I think my earliest inspiration for a werewolf hunter goes back to my father, because he absolutely hated the whole idea of werewolves. I remember when I was nine or ten; I had Power Record's "The Curse of the Werewolf," one of Marvel Comics old 70's horror titles. I was listening to the 45 and following along in the comic when my dad overheard the narration and turned off the phonograph. He didn't like all the talk of curses and evil, and he saw the werewolf as a hateful, demonic creature, so he confiscated the record. I still remember the conviction in his voice as he explained to me why I couldn't listen to it. It didn't stop me from liking those things, but it made a lasting impression.

I have a keen interest in dark fiction. Tell me how you would classify this novel and what’s dark about it?

Dark is my middle name, and this book (and its sequel) definitely falls, four-square into that category. In fact, one reviewer said the sequel was, "Much, much darker in tone than the first book in this series, though you wouldn’t think that could be possible." As far as I'm concerned, dark fiction is about more than a high body-count, and gratuitous violence just doesn't cut it; you have to create and sustain an atmosphere. As I see it, there are two basic sources of darkness – the world we see and the one we don't. Some horror novels use crime and human depravity to create their darkness; others focus on supernatural entities and powers. What I've tried to do is merge that human corruption with those diabolic agencies, and showcase the dark side of everything from religion to relationships. The book is written from Sylvester's point of view and Sylvester has a very haunted and dark-turned mind. Sylvester harbors an internecine hatred for the Beast (werewolves), the kind that burns people up from the inside. It's the very foundation of his life, and that by itself makes for a frighteningly dark world.

You quoted Nietzsche when you described the main character to me. He sounds complex. Tell me about him.

Yes, I was referring to Nietzsche's quote: "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." This describes Sylvester's condition to a tee. Because here's a man who has always wanted to be honorable and decent, and yet can't really afford to be because he has this blood-feud with the Beast. He goes through periods where he accepts his own evil as a necessity, and then turns around to resume his struggle to be something better than he has become. I think that's what keeps the character, anti-hero that he is, from becoming an all-out villain…he may do horrible things but he is never at peace with them. If a protagonist loses the readers sympathy, it won't be long before he loses their interest as well, and when that happens they stop reading. This is the most delicate line I have to walk with Sylvester, and the idea behind it is that even a bad-guy can be a hero if he's going against someone or something even viler than he is. That gives me some latitude with the character because I see the werewolf in the same terms my dad did. It also gives me a chance to pit the two kinds of darkness against one another.

This blog is called Random Musings, so give me a random quote from the book – something you’re particularly fond of.

This is the piece I used for the frontispiece of the book before it was re-issued:

"What are we running from, Logan?" Samantha shouted through her tears. "I'll tell you everything later—I swear I will! But please don't ask me now. Just hang on to Josh." The road to the cottage was patched with ice, and despite the truck's four-wheel-drive capability, I could feel the tires slipping. I slowed down as much as I dared. A single peal of metallic thunder rumbled from the roof of the cab as it buckled inward. Samantha screamed as the truck fish-tailed side to side, narrowly missing the embankments. My fight with the steering wheel was handicapped by the Colt, which I refused to release. The windshield had split into a "V," and the maddening screech of talons against painted steel made my blood run cold. I regained control of the truck, smashed the .45's barrel into the overhead bulge and pulled the trigger. The report exploded inside the cab and shattered the back glass, but it didn't stop a demon's claw from bursting through the roof! As the monster fished for prey through ruptured steel, the truck careened out of control. Sam huddled with Josh against the passenger door. Her eyes were ablaze in terror at the sight of the werewolf's groping limb. I fired in repetition at the arm and the more vital areas at the other end of it, covering the upholstery in a steaming blood bath. The road ahead curved, but the truck continued its broadside slide. There was neither time nor opportunity to react as the earth dropped off beneath the wheels. The last things I was aware of were upside-down trees, and Samantha crying out my name.

What can we expect from you next? Is this the beginning of a series?

It is. As I've said, Permuted Press contracted with me for my first two books. The second, Heart of Scars, should also be available this year. I have a third installment in the series in mind, but I won't be starting on that until the first two are up and running again. Beyond that I want to do a prequel that covers the life of Sylvester's mentor Michael Winterfox.

Where can we find you on the internet?

My website is www.hauntedjack.com, and that contains information and updates on the novels. You can also find me on Facebook under Brian P. Easton, I update that more regularly.

Who would you say your primary literary influences are?

HP Lovecraft is by far my most prolific literary influence. He remains the only author I've read who has the ability to get under my skin and into my head. On the other hand, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is my favorite book of all time and represents my other favorite genre: the western. Cormac writes extreme violence as if it was verse, and depicts scenes of atrocity with such grace that it's almost poetic.

————

Brian, this sounds right up my alley. Congratulations on finding your way to a great publishing house (I hope I get that lucky!) and thanks again for taking the time to answer these questions. I certainly hope I can have you back for the next book in the series!

I’m a complete victim of the 80’s. From time to time I pine for the days of cheesy videos, big hair, and acid-wash jeans. So here at Random Musings, I’ve declared it Thompson Twins Day. Enjoy!

Over at Apex Book Company, they’re releasing some great new books, especially some wonderfully dark fantasy. I’m going to be doing some interviews with a few of the authors/editors there so I hope you’ll take the time to check out their work. Last week I interviewed Sara M. Harvey and earlier this week was Maurice Broaddus. Today is editor, Jennifer Brozek.

————

To start, can you tell me a little about yourself.

I am an author, award winning editor, award nominated RPG writer and small press publisher who should probably sleep more than she does. I’ve been a full time freelance writer for 3.5 years and have never worked harder in my life. I can’t decide if I want to be Neil Gaiman and Stephen King’s unholy literary love child or a clone of anthologist editor Ellen Datlow. I’m married, have three cats and over one thousand books. In general, I consider myself a wordslinger and an optimist—which you kind of have to be in the publishing industry.

How long have you been writing/editing and how did you get to this point in your career?

I have been writing since the early 1990s and have been a professional author and editor since the year 2000. To get to this point in my career, I took a leap of faith in November 2006, quit my tech job and spent a year “just writing.” During that year, I met up with a freelance tech writer who got me an “in” at a big corporation who uses freelance tech writers all the time. I learned how to do that on the fly while I wrote more than 330,000 words of fiction that year—half of which was published in the following year.

The editing came later when I had the idea for my award winning anthology Grant Pass (Aug 2009, Morrigan Books). Turns out I had a knack for editing as well as writing and many projects came along for the ride. Now, I split my time between all of my loves: writing, editing, and publishing. I’m a bit like a Swiss Army knife in the publishing industry.

You have a new anthology out, Close Encounters of the Urban Kind. Tell me what inspired you to put this together?

In June 2010, I have a horror collection, called In a Gilded Light, coming out from Dark Quest Books. It is a collection of horror and supernatural vignettes. One of those vignettes is called Snipe Hunting. I had a “what if” thought wondering what would happen if someone sent a city boy on a hunt for a snipe… and he found one… and it turned out to be an alien? It got me to thinking about how urban legends would change if there was an alien encounter component to the story. I chatted with the idea with Apex Publications owner, Jason Sizemore, and he liked what he heard.

I have a keen interest in dark fiction. Tell me how you would classify this collection and what’s dark about it?

I don’t think you have any worries with Close Encounters of the Urban Kind being dark fiction. It very clearly is. There’s a lot of scary urban legends investigated with an even darker element of the alien encounter. While I do have a couple of nicer stories in the anthology, that is just to bring the reader up towards the light a little before I plunge them back down into the dark. There is a high body count, several stories that I wouldn’t read at night and, did I mention the alien clowns? Seriously. Evil alien clown.

You are exploring urban legends in this in addition to alien encounters. Give us a hint as to some of the more popular urban legends you explored.

The biggest thing I wanted to bring forth was that when urban legends or aliens are concerned, there is no safe haven. The most popular urban legends in the book are the ones that deal with people being chased in their car of having something evil in the car with them: the ax murderer in the backseat, the gang initiation, the mysterious black SUV chasing you, being kidnapped in your car and running over something living. People spend a lot of time in their cars and feel very safe there. I liked the idea of removing the car as a safe haven. Other urban legends involved strangers in the house or breaking into the house— again destroying the safe haven.

Was this a particularly difficult anthology to edit?

Honestly, no. It wasn’t. Not once I figured out two things about the overall arcing themes of the anthology. First, every story had to be about or start with an encounter. There are no prior relationships between the human encountering the alien in the setting of the urban legend. Then, as most urban legends grow from mere encounters to full stories of why the ax murderer was in the backseat, I turned reading the anthology into a journey. The beginning stories have no explanation at all. The middle ones have some explanations. The ending stories give a lot of detail on why things are happening.

The hardest part about editing this anthology was rejecting certain stories—not because they weren’t good—but because they did not fit the encounter theme of the anthology. I sent a couple of those stories up the line to Jason who published them in the April 2010 companion issue of Apex Magazine.

This blog is called Random Musings, so give me a random quote from the book – something you’re particularly fond of.

This quote comes from Jennifer Pelland’s story, The Invitation, and it has stuck with me ever since I read it.

"Everything comes from something, Daniel. Urban legends come from folklore and myths that were once born in truth." She stabbed at her floral flannelled chest, her expression pleading. "I've merely made the connections. Why can't it be everyone else who is wrong?"

Sometimes, the craziest people among us are the ones that know what’s really going on.

What can we expect from you next?

Quite a lot actually. This is a big publication year for me.

May 2010 – Shanghai Vampocalypse – Published by Savage Mojo, this is an RPG book using the Savage Worlds rules. The year is 2048 and high tech Shanghai is about to meet a supernatural monster of its own creation. If one vampire is a monster, eight million is an apocalypse.

May 2010 – The Little Finance Book That Could – Published by Lean Marketing Press, this is an autobiographical book on what I did to get out of debt and stay out of debt. It has my ten rules for getting out of debt and five principles of financial responsibility.

June 2010 – In a Gilded Light: 105 Tales of the Macabre – Published by Dark Quest Books, this is a horror collection of stories from me where I take common events and twist them into something dark and horrible. There is a high body count and most of the people I kill off are my friends. Every reviewer has admitted to nightmares or uneasy sleep after reading this collection.

September 2010 – Beauty Has Her Way – Published by Dark Quest Books, this is my next anthology. It is about women across the ages using all of their assets to get what they want. This is not a heroine’s book unless she knows how to do bad in the name of good. Beauty will have her way…even if she has to get down and dirty to do it.

Where can we find you on the internet? Blog? Twitter? Web site? Book trailer?

I live online. 100% of my work is due to the internet. You can find my portal at www.jenniferbrozek.com. I blog over at Livejournal and I twitter under the name JenniferBrozek. Finally, I am on Facebook as an individual and I have a fan page. Feel free to add me to your FB, LJ, Twitter feeds.

Any final comments or thoughts you’d like to convey that you haven’t covered?

I am a big supporter of small presses. Every company I mentioned is a small press and I publish my small press magazine, The Edge of Propinquity. I would like to encourage everyone to support their small presses, the people who work there and the authors they publish. Our supporters and our readers really are a deciding factor in whether or not we eat, pay bills and can afford to go to conventions. Please think of your small presses when you go looking for something new to read. We do appreciate it.

—————

Jennifer, you do, indeed, have a busy publishing year ahead of you and I agree about small presses. Everyone should support them. Thank you very much for taking the time to answer these questions, I really appreciate it, and I certainly hope I can have you back for future works! I want to know what else you plan on dreaming up!

Results are in (see below). I’ll blog about this later.

Over at Permuted Press, they’re releasing some great new books, especially some dark, apocalyptic fiction. I’m going to be doing some interviews with a few of the authors/editors there so I hope you’ll take the time to check out their work.

First up, Kim Paffenroth.

————

To start, can you tell me a little about yourself.

I'm a professor of religious studies and at first I wrote theology books. But even in those, there was kind of a dark side – sin, theodicy, evil, doubt, that whole looking into the abyss thing. And I also wanted to look not just at scriptures and narrowly theological works, but at pop culture – movies and novels that affect more people than just believers. So I wrote Gospel of the Living Dead, a look at Romero's zombie films and their moral outlook and their critique of our society. And that made me think it was time for me start writing my own zombie fiction.

How long have you been writing and how did you get to this point in your career?

That's a really convoluted journey. I wrote a lot of fiction when I was in middle and high school. My mom died when I was 14, and that made me write even more, I assume as an outlet for a lot of the anger and hurt I had. I'm sure none of the writing was any good, but it was useful for what it was, at that point in my life. But when I went to college, I stopped from the first day I got off the bus in front of the dorm. I just didn't need to anymore right then. Instead I read everything I could, and kept on reading through grad school and my years of teaching. And somehow it was all preparing me for another crack at writing in middle age. I never could've planned it that way, but I'm glad it went the way it did, as I think the lull and the absorption and fermentation of all those ideas over a couple decades made my writing better (not that I say it's any good – but it's better than it would've been).

You have a new book just out, Valley of the Dead. Tell me what inspired you to write this?

I've been fascinated by Romero since I saw Dawn of the Dead in its theatrical release. When I read Dante in college, I found it matched up with a lot of the questions I was having about God and grace and evil at the time. So maybe it was inevitable the two come together – first in my analysis of Romero's films (which draws heavily on parallels with Dante), and then in this version of Dante (which draws on Romero's zombies as analogous to Dante's damned).

I have a keen interest in dark fiction. Tell me how you would classify this book and what’s dark about it?

Boy, that's hard, 'cause I think people sense and respond to different kinds of darkness. In other words, there's plenty of killing in this book, and then that gives way more to torture, sadism and cruelty – and I guess most people would call those things "dark." But for me, as I was writing it, those became (as I think they do in Dante's poem) just the landscape of Hell – you take them for granted. What for me was dark (and was an addition to Dante's original, though I'm willing to bet not totally unfair to him and what he went through in his real life), was seeing a man of profound faith come to the edge of losing it, to see him consumed by doubt and anger, until he repeatedly wishes he could just sit down and die. And I don't know that he ever regains his faith: he keeps a faith in beauty and love, he even gets back a little faith in humanity, but I didn't want to make it clear cut at the end that he's fully at peace with God, after what he's seen. There's a reason we use the phrase "child-like faith" – it's because it's the kind of faith we don't have as adults, but that faith we have as adults is a sometimes a grim, dark, most unsatisfying affair.

This book draws from Dante's Inferno. Tell me about that.

What I take away from Romero are three main things that I see meshing perfectly with Dante. First, both men are incensed against the society they live in (as are the Hebrew prophets, many of whom use ghastly and violent images in their works), and they use their fictions to castigate their contemporaries. So don't be surprised at my swipes at modern day American society (though I hope they're hidden enough to be subtle and fun). As to the zombies and the damned, there are two main resemblances. Dante says that the damned in the upper levels of hell are guilty of less serious sins, for they "made reason slave to appetite" and "lost the good of intellect": well, that's a zombie right there – a mindless machine pursuing its endless, unquenchable hunger. So I have Dante encounter mostly zombies first in his journey through the valley. But Dante claims that in the lower circles of hell, people are guilty of much worse things, sins that are not just appetites run amok, but are acts of deliberate, calculated cruelty and deceit. So in my story, Dante increasingly encounters more live humans and their perverted abuses of both the living and the dead. It's a wild ride that I think anyone will find dizzying and enjoyable, whether or not they know the original.

Sometimes we have to be ruthless in writing/editing. We cut scenes, eliminate characters or even kill them off. Tell me what was the hardest of these in this book.

I can think of lots of those instances in my other novels, so I know exactly what you mean. But this time – no, I'd read Inferno so many times by the time I sat down to write this that I knew exactly what was going to happen. I knew what sins I wanted to leave out and which ones I wanted to focus on. If anything, I had the opposite experience – this time, new ideas kept creeping in, and I kept most of them, because they enriched and complicated the story so well.

This blog is called Random Musings, so give me a random quote from the book – something you’re particularly fond of.

"And with an empty feeling in his chest, Dante wondered why such a cry did not bring the mountains' stones crashing down on them, if such pillars were held up only by love and justice, and not by the kind of brute, soulless force that could noiselessly withstand the assault of so much power, passion, and pain." Gives me chills every time I read it and I can barely get through it when I try to read it out loud in public.

What can we expect from you next?

This year has a lot coming for me. My first novel, Dying to Live, will be out in a new edition from Pocket Books this fall. My novelette, Orpheus and the Pearl, is also coming out at the same time in a new edition from Belfire Press, bound with a story by the fantastic Dave Dunwoody. Then the third installment in my Dying to Live saga will be out early next year. And I'm shopping a non-zombie novel at the moment: I think like every zombie author, I'm looking forward to publishing something without my favorite monster, just to prove to myself that I can.

Where can we find you on the internet?

Blog: Gospel of the Living Dead
Twitter
Web site: Just the blog. Updated regularly and I like to keep it nice and tidy with lots of links!

Book trailer:

Any final comments or thoughts you’d like to convey that you haven’t covered?

Just that I love to interact with fans, so please stop by, leave a comment, or if you see I'm at a con, come and chat for a bit!

—————

It sounds like you have a lot coming, Kim! Thank you very much for taking the time to answer these questions, I really appreciate it. Best of luck with the books and please feel free to drop by again with your next installment!

Over at Permuted Press, they’re releasing some great new books, especially some dark, apocalyptic fiction. I’m going to be doing some interviews with a few of the authors/editors there so I hope you’ll take the time to check out their work.

First up, Kim Paffenroth.

————

To start, can you tell me a little about yourself.

I'm a professor of religious studies and at first I wrote theology books. But even in those, there was kind of a dark side – sin, theodicy, evil, doubt, that whole looking into the abyss thing. And I also wanted to look not just at scriptures and narrowly theological works, but at pop culture – movies and novels that affect more people than just believers. So I wrote Gospel of the Living Dead, a look at Romero's zombie films and their moral outlook and their critique of our society. And that made me think it was time for me start writing my own zombie fiction.

How long have you been writing and how did you get to this point in your career?

That's a really convoluted journey. I wrote a lot of fiction when I was in middle and high school. My mom died when I was 14, and that made me write even more, I assume as an outlet for a lot of the anger and hurt I had. I'm sure none of the writing was any good, but it was useful for what it was, at that point in my life. But when I went to college, I stopped from the first day I got off the bus in front of the dorm. I just didn't need to anymore right then. Instead I read everything I could, and kept on reading through grad school and my years of teaching. And somehow it was all preparing me for another crack at writing in middle age. I never could've planned it that way, but I'm glad it went the way it did, as I think the lull and the absorption and fermentation of all those ideas over a couple decades made my writing better (not that I say it's any good – but it's better than it would've been).

You have a new book just out, Valley of the Dead. Tell me what inspired you to write this?

I've been fascinated by Romero since I saw Dawn of the Dead in its theatrical release. When I read Dante in college, I found it matched up with a lot of the questions I was having about God and grace and evil at the time. So maybe it was inevitable the two come together – first in my analysis of Romero's films (which draws heavily on parallels with Dante), and then in this version of Dante (which draws on Romero's zombies as analogous to Dante's damned).

I have a keen interest in dark fiction. Tell me how you would classify this book and what’s dark about it?

Boy, that's hard, 'cause I think people sense and respond to different kinds of darkness. In other words, there's plenty of killing in this book, and then that gives way more to torture, sadism and cruelty – and I guess most people would call those things "dark." But for me, as I was writing it, those became (as I think they do in Dante's poem) just the landscape of Hell – you take them for granted. What for me was dark (and was an addition to Dante's original, though I'm willing to bet not totally unfair to him and what he went through in his real life), was seeing a man of profound faith come to the edge of losing it, to see him consumed by doubt and anger, until he repeatedly wishes he could just sit down and die. And I don't know that he ever regains his faith: he keeps a faith in beauty and love, he even gets back a little faith in humanity, but I didn't want to make it clear cut at the end that he's fully at peace with God, after what he's seen. There's a reason we use the phrase "child-like faith" – it's because it's the kind of faith we don't have as adults, but that faith we have as adults is a sometimes a grim, dark, most unsatisfying affair.

This book draws from Dante's Inferno. Tell me about that.

What I take away from Romero are three main things that I see meshing perfectly with Dante. First, both men are incensed against the society they live in (as are the Hebrew prophets, many of whom use ghastly and violent images in their works), and they use their fictions to castigate their contemporaries. So don't be surprised at my swipes at modern day American society (though I hope they're hidden enough to be subtle and fun). As to the zombies and the damned, there are two main resemblances. Dante says that the damned in the upper levels of hell are guilty of less serious sins, for they "made reason slave to appetite" and "lost the good of intellect": well, that's a zombie right there – a mindless machine pursuing its endless, unquenchable hunger. So I have Dante encounter mostly zombies first in his journey through the valley. But Dante claims that in the lower circles of hell, people are guilty of much worse things, sins that are not just appetites run amok, but are acts of deliberate, calculated cruelty and deceit. So in my story, Dante increasingly encounters more live humans and their perverted abuses of both the living and the dead. It's a wild ride that I think anyone will find dizzying and enjoyable, whether or not they know the original.

Sometimes we have to be ruthless in writing/editing. We cut scenes, eliminate characters or even kill them off. Tell me what was the hardest of these in this book.

I can think of lots of those instances in my other novels, so I know exactly what you mean. But this time – no, I'd read Inferno so many times by the time I sat down to write this that I knew exactly what was going to happen. I knew what sins I wanted to leave out and which ones I wanted to focus on. If anything, I had the opposite experience – this time, new ideas kept creeping in, and I kept most of them, because they enriched and complicated the story so well.

This blog is called Random Musings, so give me a random quote from the book – something you’re particularly fond of.

"And with an empty feeling in his chest, Dante wondered why such a cry did not bring the mountains' stones crashing down on them, if such pillars were held up only by love and justice, and not by the kind of brute, soulless force that could noiselessly withstand the assault of so much power, passion, and pain." Gives me chills every time I read it and I can barely get through it when I try to read it out loud in public.

What can we expect from you next?

This year has a lot coming for me. My first novel, Dying to Live, will be out in a new edition from Pocket Books this fall. My novelette, Orpheus and the Pearl, is also coming out at the same time in a new edition from Belfire Press, bound with a story by the fantastic Dave Dunwoody. Then the third installment in my Dying to Live saga will be out early next year. And I'm shopping a non-zombie novel at the moment: I think like every zombie author, I'm looking forward to publishing something without my favorite monster, just to prove to myself that I can.

Where can we find you on the internet?

Blog: Gospel of the Living Dead
Twitter
Web site: Just the blog. Updated regularly and I like to keep it nice and tidy with lots of links!

Book trailer:

Any final comments or thoughts you’d like to convey that you haven’t covered?

Just that I love to interact with fans, so please stop by, leave a comment, or if you see I'm at a con, come and chat for a bit!

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It sounds like you have a lot coming, Kim! Thank you very much for taking the time to answer these questions, I really appreciate it. Best of luck with the books and please feel free to drop by again with your next installment!