Enter the Octopus

David Lubar is the author of several books for young people, the most recent being “Nathan Abercrombie, Accidental Zombie: My Rotten Life“, a story about the misadventures of a hapless grade school zombie. Recently, Lubar was kind enough to answer a few questions about his book and also his own experiences growing up.

I understand that “Night of the Living Dead” had a strong impression on you as a young man. Can you tell me about that, and maybe a little bit more about the kind of child you where? What kinds of things interested you the most?

Night of the Living Dead was playing at the Community Theater in Morristown, NJ in a double feature with Dr. Who and the Daleks.  I went to see it with a friend.  I was probably around 13 at the time.   Dr. Who, which was fairly light-hearted, came on first, leaving us totally unprepared for our subsequent visit to a black-and-white Pennsylvania cemetery.  My friend and I were so spooked by Night of the Living Dead that we stayed to watch some of Dr. Who again just to calm down.  While we were in the theater, a snow storm had hit town.  My friend lived in a different direction, near the theater.  I had about a mile to walk.  The whole way home through the eerily silent streets, I didn’t see a single person.  That definitely left an impression.  For anyone who watches that movie today and wonders what the big deal is, I recommend reading Stephen King’s discussion of his changing perceptions of the original Cat People in his book Danse Macabre.

As for what kind of child I was, my favorite cartoonist was Charles Addams, so I guess I was doomed from an early age.  I loved monster movies, monster magazines, and monster comics.  I did monster makeup every Halloween.  My other big interest as a kid, beyond devouring science fiction and fantasy, was stage and close-up magic, along with the allied arts, such as ventriloquism and juggling.  I had a vast array of ways to annoy my peers and teachers.  Pick a card.  Please.  Come on.  Pick one.  Hey, wait.  You have a coin in your ear.  It’s amazing I didn’t get beaten up on a daily basis.  (Did you notice how my lips didn’t move when I said that?)

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So what do you think of the latest Really Big Issue going around the blogosophere?

You mean Iran?

No, not that.

Yeah, that was kind of pre-Michael Jackson, wasn’t it? Nobody really gives a shit about that stuff now. Sure was fun dyeing our Twitter icons green, though, wasn’t it? I was all, “Oooh, I’ve got you now, Ahmadinejad. My LOLCAT icon is wearing emerald green, and I’ve changed my location listing to Tehran. That’ll throw your modern intelligence-gathering apparatus off! FREEEEDOM!

Christ. You’re in a mood.

Yeah, I am. I’ve been feeling a little tired lately. Now what did you want to talk about?

Nipples.

You’ve got my attention. Go on.

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If you needed any more signs that zombies are big in publishing, then Pocket Book’s new seven book deal with indie horror press Permuted is as good as any. Permuted Press founder Jacob Kier recently spoke with me about what this new agreement means for Permuted Press and zombie fans, and what it’s like to see the tiny sub-genre he’s championed for years grow into a pop culture obsession.

First, of all, congratulations for the deal with Pocket Books. What does this mean for Permuted Press, and what does it mean for zombie fans?

Thank you! For Permuted Press this means the chance to bring some of our titles to a much larger market than we’ve ever been able to reach before. The titles being co-published with Pocket Books will be available everywhere that Pocket Books are sold including the shelves of your local bookstore chains.

For zombie fans this is going to be another major push in taking zombie fiction mainstream which undoubtedly will lead to more accessibility to new and exciting tales of the living dead.

How did this deal come together, anyway?

It began with Simon & Schuster (the parent company of Pocket Books) taking an interest in our most popular title, Day by Day Armageddon by J.L. Bourne. From there, with the help of literary agent Marc Geralds, it quickly grew into a multi-book co-publishing venture features some of Permuted’s bestselling titles.

Speaking of big deals, it seems like I heard something about movie options being sold for one of your novels. Is that right? How is that coming along?

Movie rights for David Wong’s John Dies at the End (which has since moved on to a new home at St. Martin’s Press) was optioned to Don Coscarelli of Bubba Ho-tep fame. Unfortunately Permuted hasn’t had anything to do with that whole process, so I don’t know what the status of the film is.

How did Permuted Press come together and what pushed you in the direction of specializing in zombie and post-apocalyptic fiction?

Permuted Press grew almost entirely out of my love for zombies and apocalyptic literature. Leading up to starting Permuted I’d just read Brian Keene’s The Rising and Simon Clark’s Blood Crazy. Around that same time period I learned about print on demand (POD) printing technology and thought “Hey, it would be really easy and fun to put out a zombie anthology!”  It began with the intention to publish just one book–a zombie anthology called The Undead–and things grew from there. I know now that thinking it would be easy was quite naive, but it was indeed quite fun (and addictive).

Over the years, it seems like we’ve seen the kind of work you do go from being marginalized to something approaching mainstream acceptance and celebration. What has that been like for you?

I have to admit the level of success Permuted has achieved was completely unexpected to me, and is unprecedented for any small POD publisher. Having started the press as essentially a hobby I had very modest goals. But I am, of course, overjoyed at the accomplishments of Permuted and its authors.

If I’m a reader that’s new to Permuted Press, what would you recommend for me to read? What are the “shouldn’t miss” books?

The seven titles being released as part of the joint venture with Pocket Books are the cream of the crop, so they’re a great place to start. The first 2 coming out of the venture–J.L. Bourne’s Day by Day Armageddon and Z.A. Recht’s Plague of the Dead–are now out of print until their new editions are released in Oct. 2009 and Jan. 2010. But David Dunwoody’s Empire, Bowie Ibarra’s Down the Road, and Kim Paffenroth’s Dying to Live are all available for purchase right now.

Where can we find your books?

Permuted’s books are available at PermutedPress.com, all major online bookstores, and a selection of titles can be found in the horror section of most Borders locations.

Alex Irvine’s new novel Buyout depicts a future America where prisoners serving life terms can cash in on their remaining years, receiving a lump sum of money to distribute in any way they seem fit in exchange for their lives. It’s seen as a welcome solution by both a cash-strapped state faced with the prospect of providing lifetime care for a growing prison population, and inmates who can use the money to provide for their families or pay restitution to their victims. Others, however, aren’t so sure about these buyouts, including newly minted Term Life Buyout Facilitator Martin Kindred.

I spoke with Irvine yesterday about the death penalty, prisons for profit and just how close we may be to a real-life buyout. 

Tell me a little bit about what got you interested in a topic like the death penalty, and why you thought it would be a worthwhile topic to approach via fiction.

It’s an interesting topic to me because I have two different perspectives on it. On the one hand, if someone killed members of my family or people I love, I would want that person dead. On the other, I believe that a civilized society does not condone the practice of state murder. Any issue that gets people hung up between ideals and gut reactions is a good one to write about—but also a dangerous one to write about because it’s easy to demagogue one side or the other and come up with a book that’s just an extended polemic. InBuyout, I was trying to avoid that problem while still grappling with some of the problems surrounding capital punishment and the American correctional system more broadly.

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Filipino blogger and writer Charles Tan has been a quiet but persistent force in the online world, producing quality interviews with some of the western world’s top science fiction and fantasy authors while working to promote speculative fiction in his own country.

Tell me a little bit about yourself. Who are you, where did you grow up?

By day, I’m an editorial assistant who, uh, stalks celebrities and CEOs. By night, I’m a blogger who stalks authors/editors/publishers/publicists!

I was born and raised in the Philippines so I consider myself a Filipino. I’m born to two pure-blooded Chinese though so there’s some racial tension there (on both sides–the Filipino-Chinese community has some biases against Filipinos and vice versa).

There’s nothing I like more than talking about myself, but to keep it brief, I’m someone who’s passionate about books. One day, I was this ignorant boy who was playing around on the Internet and the next day, I was pushing myself how I could use this medium to help other people as well as myself.

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Say, if you’re interested, you can read a short interview I did with James Morrow at TOR.COM about his novel Shambling Towards Hiroshima.

(Disclosure: I’m promoting Shambling Towards Hiroshima)

Author Jeffrey Thomas is best know for his creation Punktown, an offworld colony ruled by shadowy corporate interests and inhabited by myriad intelligent races, of which humanity is only one. In addition to his Punktown novels and short stories, Thomas has written many other works of horror, fantasy, science fiction, including a Nightmare on Elm Street original novel called The Dream Dealers. Learn more about Thomas’ work at http://www.jeffreyethomas.com

ETO: Would you mind introducing yourself to my readers?

JT: I’m Jeffrey Thomas, a writer of lies meant to postulate false futures and disrupt one’s healthy sleep. I am also or have been an artist, a publisher, a husband (repeat offender), a father, a company drone, an inhabitant of Massachusetts, a confused soul adrift on the sea of life’s heaving bosom.

ETO: When did you start writing?

JT: When I was very young. It started mostly with creating my own comic books. I remember being hospitalized with a hernia at six, and being frustrated because I wanted to name the comic book I was working on WAR but I wasn’t sure how to spell it. (Now that I think of it, maybe that was the genesis of my novel BLUE WAR. Hmm.) As I like to relate, the word balloons and commentary in my comic books began to crowd the pictures out until they no longer remained. I completed my first novel (called SIX TO SIX) at 14, a story of Earth colonists on another planet (a genesis of PUNKTOWN?) mixing cultures with a simian-like native race, spawning interspecies gangs of discounted youth. It was sort of PLANET OF THE APES meets A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.

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“It’s one thing when it’s a novel.  When you need to turn out 110,000 words (only by the time you’re done, it’s turned into 143,000 words) of a fantasy set in mid-seventeenth-century London, then you can convince yourself that it’s reasonable to be reading contemporary diaries of the Short Parliament and dense Marxist analyses of the causes of the English Civil War and encyclopedic volumes of English folklore and modern biological discussions of the bubonic plague and architectural histories of Westminster Palace and all the rest of the things piling up on your research bookshelf.  Because you need to *know* these things if you’re to write about them plausibly.  And you even have a contract for the book, so there’s money in it for you.

But sometimes it’s a short story.  And then you’re reading a 480-page ethnography on the Nahua Indians of the Huasteca Veracruzana and e-mailing six different professors at six different universities for information on Aztec burial practices and the likely placement of Tamoanchan and the proper orthography of foreign words, and it’s all for a measly 8,400-word story.  Or you’re e-mailing the FBI asking if you can talk to one of their psychologists and hoping they don’t look at you funny when you tell them you want to figure out how they would handle an agent who is also a shapeshifter.  Or you’re glaring at the desert section of the U.S. Army Survival Manual because it doesn’t tell you how somebody armed with rocks could kill lizards and oh by the way which kinds of scorpions are okay to eat?  Or you’re giving yourself late-night lessons in classical Hebrew grammar because you’re at the end of a long daisy-chain of silly etymological tricks and this is apparently the only way your subconscious will let you name that character.  And when it’s all done, you’ve got no promise anybody will buy the story, or pay you more than ten bucks when they do.

Those are the times when you have to accept that, yes, you’re crazy, and the only thing to do is grin and dive right back in.”

-Marie Brennan, author, “Midnight Never Come.”

Mythic Delirium editor Mike Allen’s newest project is “Clockwork Phoenix,” a collection of tales of “beauty and strangeness” including work from Ekaterina Sedia, Marie Brennan, Cat Rambo, Catherynne M. Valente and many others. You can find out more at http://www.clockworkphoenix.com

What, may I ask, is a Clockwork Phoenix, anyway?
I like to think of it as an avenging machine that rises from the molten furnace, its gears and springs and pistons clicking into place with noises not unlike the sound guns make when you pull back the slide to put a bullet in the chamber. Its feathers are sharper than razors, and when it flies with its wings extended it’s as deadly to lowly creatures of the flesh as any killing blade. The question is: will it reach its target before it dissolves again into ash?
But that doesn’t have much to do with the book I put together. *g*
“Clockwork Phoenix” is just a catchy-sounding phrase meant to signify unexpected juxtapositions. In and of itself it means nothing.

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Adam Lowe is the editor of Polluto, the anti-pop culture journal, and the guy behind Doghorn publishing. He recently spoke with me about the latest issue of his journal.

What’s the theme of Issue 3?

‘Sex in the Time of VHS’.

What on earth does that mean?

We wanted to take a look at sex, relationships and gender as it relates to technology. VHS implies a specific time, but we’ve allowed writers to go further than that and look at VHS as a symbol for technological obsolescence. We’ve asked them to address incompatibility, formatting and video.

So snuff, right?

Well, yes. Some of it. We have Jack the Ripper’s girlfriend and an immortal snuff superstar. We have apocalypse-by-pollen (with repopulation on the cards) and interdimensional, bisexual madness.

Where do you come up with your titles?

Alcohol. Lots and lots of alcohol. Occasionally from the gremlins who live under the desks in our office. But since none of us ever go into the office, who can say . . . ?

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