| A Conversation With David Morrell | |||||||||||||
| An interview with Lisa DuMond | |||||||||||||
| August 1999 | |||||||||||||
|
Yes, the bad guys in the story would have had their hands full if they'd tried to tackle Rambo. Lately
I've been noticing a pattern in my work. I'll do a book or a story that has a
super-professional at home in a world of action (the executive protector of
The Fifth Profession, for example, or the CIA operative in Extreme Denial), and then
I'll do an in-between book that has an ordinary person trying to survive in extraordinary circumstances
(the obituary writer in Desperate Measures, a book not to be confused with the wretched movie of the
same name, or the photographer in Double Image). Evidently this alternation satisfies something in my
imagination. Two different views of the action hero. I can't help remarking that next year's new novel,
Burnt Sienna, is about a painter who was a Marine helicopter pilot during the invasion of
Panama. Both types of hero co-exist in the same protagonist.
Romero is another of my favourite approaches to a hero. He's a police officer, which suggests that he's an
expert when it comes to action, but in reality, because he works in a small town, he doesn't have the
depth of experience to prepare him for the horror he stumbles into. Thus he is only an apparent
expert. The story is an initiation of sorts. He learns to be a professional. The hard way. With regard
to curiosity getting him into trouble, I think it's
really obsession that gets him into trouble. Of course, one can lead to the other, but because of the
personal problems that Romero has, he's ready to grab at anything that will distract him.
Shoes are banal, yes, and thus an interesting unexpected catalyst. This part of the story is based
on real life. My home is in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the story is set. A couple of years ago, on
a major street near where I live, shoes began appearing, sometimes singly, sometimes in pairs. Old
and new. All kinds of shoes. Every morning, on schedule, shoes would be on the dividing line of the
street. There was a lot of speculation about who was putting them there. The local newspaper did several articles.
No one had any answers, and eventually the shoes stopped appearing. I couldn't stop thinking about
them and finally wrote "Rio Grande Gothic."
The ordinary made extraordinary can be an interesting dramatic situation.
My main characters often have an uncanny ability to recognize when the ordinary has tipped over into
something else. It's a rare talent (or curse), and it separates Romero from his fellow officers. The
System abandons him, forcing him to confront the terrifying truth on his own. I'm reminded of the
police chief in my non-supernatural horror novel, The Totem. That character also is abandoned by the System.
If a character had the weight of public opinion behind him, he or she wouldn't interest me. There
wouldn't be any conflict. Plus, public opinion is usually at odds with my own feelings.
Romero's life is falling apart. It's easier for him to obsess about his work and spend all night on
a stakeout to see who's dropping the shoes than it is to try to get control of his personal life,
which (given the death of his son) cannot be controlled.
Yes, the first moment of horror occurs about 5 pages into the story.
Until then, the enigma about the shoes has been engaging, I think, and even slightly humorous. The
reader follows where I lead. It's as if I'm fishing and the hook is gently in the reader's
mouth. But then the real nature of the story is revealed, and I pull hard on the hook, trying to
give the reader a jolt. Whenever I describe this moment in the story to friends, I start
laughing. Strong moments in a plot always strike me as having black humour, but only I, apparently, see the joke.
New Mexico is one of the most sparsely populated states in the US. Only one and a half million people
live here. There are huge distances between towns. The landscape is incredibly varied and majestic,
but also foreboding. You don't take long trips without making sure you have emergency provisions. A
lot of people have handguns in their cars. Only in a state like this, with the isolation that it
has, could a story like this be set. "Rio Grande Gothic" wouldn't work in New York State, for
example. Too many people. What would you call it? Hudson River Gothic? There's something about the
remoteness of the west that makes this particular story possible.
My fiction is frequently described as being cinematic. But as producers have frequently
discovered, the vividness of the story usually comes from the way I use a character's
viewpoint. Most of my fiction is described from the interior of a character. If I've done my
job correctly, the reader will so identify with the character that the character's perspective
becomes like a movie to the reader. The Washington Post once said that my
fiction has a "you-are-there quality" that makes reading my prose feel "like attending a
private screening." It's something I don't think about it. The effect is something I automatically
tend toward, although achieving the effect requires various techniques that I developed over the
years and some that I learned from Hemingway, whose style was the subject of my Master's thesis.
What it comes down to is this: any writer who consciously sets out to write a book that can easily
be translated into a film is setting severe limitations. Movies are by nature exterior to a
character's thought processes and emotions. Whenever I pick up fiction by someone who's been a
screenwriter, I always find the same thing -- emphasis on externals, on description, on plot, but
not on a character's mental conflict. The latter doesn't translate to film. But mental conflict is
what most interests me, and what makes it hard for filmmakers to adapt what seems cinematic in my work.
Let me start by reversing the emphasis of the question. If I see something on the news, I
automatically dismiss it as a possibility for fiction. At the same time, I imagine hundreds
of writers being inspired by a real-life event and writing a story about it, only to discover
that their stories (or novels) all reach the market at the same time, that the market becomes
glutted, and that all the stories seem unoriginal. The only news flashes I want are from my
psyche. Mind you, the shoes in "Rio Grande Gothic" did appear in the local newspaper, but
they were only the start of an extremely disturbing sequence that I knew only someone as narratively
crazy as myself could (or would want to) imagine. To go back to the question, yes, what a writer
wants (this writer at any rate) is the sense that the story has a basis in reality, that it is
presented in such a way that the reader is hypnotized into believing the fictional reality of the story.
Each day, I am surprised anew by the capacity for human beings to engage in ever more weird and
dangerous behaviour. I suspect that past centuries had equal shockers, but we never heard about
them because of the limited means of passing on information. In the age of CNN and the internet,
there are few secrets. We learn about horrors that might have been hidden in past times, and we
learn about these horrors with remarkable speed. It's getting to the point where watching the
evening news is like reading an anthology of horror scenes.
Lisa DuMond writes science fiction and humour. She co-authored the 45th anniversary issue cover of MAD Magazine. Previews of her latest, as yet unpublished, novel are available at Hades Online. |
||||||||||||
 
|
If you find any errors, typos or anything else worth mentioning,
please send it to editor@sfsite.com.
Copyright © 1996-2013 SF Site All Rights Reserved Worldwide