I had the opportunity to interview author Wrath James White about his upcoming novels, what makes real horror, and why it is that we respond to things that go bump in the dark.
LT: Tell us about your latest book.
WJW: I have two novels coming out this year. The Resurrectionist is coming out in hardback from Cargo Cult Books and as a mass-market paperback from Leisure books. It’s about a serial killer who can bring his victims back from the dead with no memory of their deaths. The story centers around Sarah Lincoln, a woman who lives across the street from the killer and who begins to have nightmares every night about she and her husband being murdered in their sleep. When she begins to find clues around her house, bloody sheets in the laundry, blood stains on the mattress, clean spots on the carpet, she begins trying to piece the mystery together in time to save herself from being murdered… again.
I also have a novel coming out from Necro books called Yaccub’s Curse. This is the story of Malik Black, a teenage enforcer for the local drug kingpin in his little North Philadelphia neighborhood. When Malik is ordered to murder a crack-whore and her newborn baby he has a revelation that leads him to believe that his employer is really Satan and that the crack-baby that he has been ordered to kill is the second-coming of Christ. Malik then finds himself in the middle of a battle between good and evil, salvation and redemption, the violence of the streets and the power of the occult.
LT: Some of the reviews I have read of your previous works describe your writing as “extreme horror”. Do you feel this description is correct?
WJW: My writing is certainly not tame. I would never be accused of writing Quiet PG-13 horror. I go all out on my descriptions. I don’t hold anything back. A lot of writers believe in leaving things up to the reader’s imagination but I don’t believe in that. I believe that the reader buys a writer’s book to see what’s in the author’s mind. They want to be entertained by the writer’s imagination. Not their own. They want to see things as he sees it. So I give them that. I describe all the violence as I see it. If there’s sex in it then I describe that with all the detail that I describe a sunset or a rose garden. Not all of my novels have sex in them but when they do it’s graphic just as the violence and gore is graphic.
LT: You have previously written with Maurice Broaddus (Orgy of Souls) and Monica J. O’Rourke (Poisoning Eros). Do you have any future projects planned with other authors? Why or why not?
WJW: Brian Keene and I have been talking about writing a novel together for a few years and I’ve got one hell of a story in mind for us to collaborate on. It’s just a matter now of finding the time. We’re both very busy. Maurice and I also have a post-apocalyptic novel in the planning stages. Hopefully, I’ll get to both novels next year.
LT: What kinds of ideas inspire your stories?
WJW: Arguments. Debates. Anytime I find myself struggling to explain an idea to someone it has a good chance of becoming a story. My stories are often just long hypothetical situations to illustrate some concept or idea I want to communicate.
LT: Is there anything that you’d like to change about earlier novels, or things that you’d like to try in a different way now?
WJW: Honestly? No. Each novel that I have written was a moment in my life, a state of mind that can’t be duplicated. Every one of those novels would be different if I wrote them now because I’m different now, as a writer and as a person. Better is some ways and worse in others. After I deal with a subject matter in a certain way I move on. I may revisit that subject matter but never in the same way.
LT: What authors do you admire?
WJW: I admire anyone who has found a way to make a living in this business. If you have managed to do this full-time and support yourself and your family than you have my respect and I mean that. This is a hard business. I can’t imagine what I would be writing if I had to support myself this way. I have a certain freedom because this isn’t my fulltime gig. I don’t rely on my novels to feed my kids. If I take some wild artistic gamble and it flops my kids still eat. It takes a lot of guts to stay true to your art when failure means the bills don’t get paid. The guys who can remain innovative under that kind of pressure are my idols.
LT: Do you think your stories would lead well to screenplays?
WJW: Absolutely. My writing is so visual that it would be easy to add live imagery to them. The level of emotion that I put into my work would probably be a blast for an actor to portray.
LT: What fears— real or imagined, belonging to you or others—would you like to explore in your writing, which you haven’t tapped into yet?
WJW: I think I’ve hit most of them or I’m at least in the process of doing so. I have a lot of work on the drawing table that addresses some of the things I haven’t explored yet or have not explored in detail or from all available angles. There’s the end of the world, body horrors like disease and mutation, vampires, all types of fanaticism like religion, greed, and patriotism, fear of “the other” as in racism, sexism, nationalism, homophobia, fear of nature, fear of technology. All of these have the potential to and have historically lead to great evil and that’s fodder for a good horror story. There’s so much evil out there in the world I don’t think I’ll ever run out of material.
LT: In your opinion, what is the major ingredient that makes a story frightening?
WJW: If you can imagine it happening to you. If it’s personal. If readers can’t relate to it then they won’t be scared by it. The more you can ground a story in reality, in the mundane, before you introduce the horror element, the greater the potential for fear. That’s why most horror takes place in the dark because we all spend a good portion of our lives in the dark. You can watch “Alien” and when you take away the spaceships and the distant planets you have a big scary thing jumping out at you from the dark. So the next time you get up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water or a midnight snack you’ll be in the same environment that Sigourney Weaver was in when she was attacked by the Alien. Not on a spaceship. In the dark. Now if you add to that and put it in even more common surrounding like a parking garage, a bedroom, or a basement or attic in your own home, you’ll get them every time. Add in other common fears and moments of discomfort, being stopped by the police or some other authority figure, being alone with a stranger, the death of a loved one, undergoing surgery, making a mistake or a bad decision that hurts someone, having sex, giving birth etc. and you have the perfect theater for your horror story.
LT: Can you give us a release date/ publication information for the latest books?
WJW: Yaccub’s Curse is due to be released in September. The hardback of The Resurrectionist is due in October 2009 and the mass-market paperback in December 2009.
©2009 Lori Titus
