Man of Mystery, Part IV

(This is the final part of Ali Karim’s appreciation of 55-year-old American novelist Robert McCammon. Previous installments in this series can be found here.)

So, after his novel Gone South reached U.S. bookstores in 1992, Alabama author Robert R. McCammon “retired” from publishing. For years, the only source of information about him was fan Hunter Goatley’s unofficial McCammon Web site, Lights Out! There were rumors about an unpublished McCammon work entitled The Village, but as the 20th century wound into the 21st, the author asked Goatley to take down his Web site. Which he did, regretfully. It appeared to McCammon’s followers--me included--that his career had come to an end.

But then suddenly, about year later, I received an e-mail message from Goatley, informing me that McCammon was back to writing, and that a new Web site would soon premiere. That site went up in 2001, and helped mark the end of McCammon’s use of his middle initial (which, by the way, stands for “Rick”). I expected after that that the novelist would finally bring out The Village. As it happened, though, he was actually working on something completely different. In a 2005 interview between Goatley and McCammon, they addressed the fate of The Village:

McCammon: Yeah. The Village was also an experiment, I think. Though I do think it is an excellent book--I think The Village has some of the best writing that I’ve done, but it’s just so different, because it’s about the band of actors and actresses in Russia in World War II. At one point, my game plan was that I wanted to visit different historical eras. It was going to be for myself, too, because I wanted to educate myself in different historical eras. So I was going to do [Speaks the] Nightbird, and then I was going to do The Village, and then I was going to do one set in ancient Rome, and then there was going to be one set in the coal mines in England, and ... It would have been a tremendous amount of work, but beyond that, I think it would have scared publishers to death. Because publishers like for you to kind of do the--I won’t say “the one-note thing”--but it’s difficult for publishers to get a handle on how they should promote you, or how they should market you.

Goatley: Well, there were other problems with that, too. Publishers were scared of the subject matter, the cultural thing: European publishers thought European audiences wouldn’t read a book set in Europe during World War II that was written by an American. ...

McCammon: Yeah, right. Yeah. And there was some question about should it be marketed to men or women or ... Even though it had a woman as the lead, it was like, “Well, it’s set in war time, so shouldn’t it be marketed to men?” You know, I’m trying to avoid that kind of, uh--I’ll use the word--I’m trying to avoid that kind of crap. I want to make things simple, and it’s simpler for me to do the Matthew Corbett books set in 1700s. It’s simpler, and I’m trying to keep things simple. I want to enjoy what I’m doing. I’m trying to remove this unnecessary complexity from the writing and publishing process.

The first new McCammon novel in a decade--Speaks the Nightbird, which introduced the series character Matthew Corbett, a late-17th-century clerk working with a traveling magistrate who’s responsible for conducting witch trials--reached U.S. bookstores in 2002. Thanks to Goatley, I was able to get my hands on an advance reader’s copy ... and devoured it. And as it turns out, I wasn’t the only one captivated. “This is a masterful historical mystery novel with detail and characters, and with a whopping 670 pages, it is a book that you will get lost in, and wish it could continue for longer,” Stephen King wrote of Nightbird at the time.

The release of that novel reinvigorated Hunter Goatley, who further developed his McCammon Web site into the most comprehensive source of information about this enigmatic writer. Goatley also maintains a mailing list, and fans are sent e-mail notices as soon as he has posted major updates or new information to his site.

One of those notices, in 2007, said that the second installment of McCammon’s Corbett series, The Queen of Bedlam, was due out soon. I also heard that the author was committed to attending the next fall’s Bouchercon, which was to be held in Anchorage, Alaska. I cursed loudly, realizing that I couldn’t make the trip to the Last Frontier myself. But I did have the pleasure of reading Bedlam in advance of its publication, and wrote a review of it for the British e-zine Shots. That critique read, in part:

Bedlam is a creepy tale set at the time when New York City had a population that was in the thousands, and split between the Dutch and English settlers with a vibrancy that foretold its importance in the newly evolving America. Under the pen of McCammon it was also a very dangerous place.

Bedlam contains many complex plot strands, [and] a plethora of colourful and well-defined characters that intersect with young Corbett’s life, leading to a terrifying hunt for a serial-killer named “The Masker”. During this journey Corbett discovers a whole lot more about himself, swordplay and life.

Corbett is working for a magistrate, Nathaniel Powers, but soon finds himself turning detective for the Herrald Agency as a junior investigator in this fledging private investigations firm. The novel’s style reminded me of my own youth, when I devoured the tales of Holmes and Watson on the prowl in foggy, gas-light London. In fact if you enjoyed the work of Conan Doyle, you’ll love this novel.

The title’s “Queen” does not feature until much later and is a mysterious and unidentified old woman locked away at a mental institution that the Herrald Agency send Corbett to investigate. McCammon adds to the brew Eben Ausley, the pedophile Headmaster who abused many of Corbett’s friends at the orphanage that raised him, and who now resides in New York. The problem is that the serial killer (The Masker) and Ausley are destined to meet and the results will be death.

The beauty of McCammon’s prose coupled with his meticulous period research, [and] the array of surreal characters that follow the twisting narrative makes this novel so damned exciting. It is remarkable how McCammon manages to weave all these plot-strands and characters into a tapestry that is as exciting as it is beautiful and leads to a virtuoso climax which I just didn’t see coming.

I have the feeling that, while McCammon earned renown as a horror writer during that genre’s 1980s boom, it will be the Matthew Corbett mysteries for which he will be most fondly remembered. The Queen of Bedlam marks him as a master novelist and should not be missed.

Not long after reading that book, I finally had the chance to conduct a rare interview with McCammon via e-mail. We discussed his literary influences, his transition away from horror fiction, and the future of his Corbett series.

Ali Karim: I noticed that you were at Bouchercon in Alaska last year, launching The Queen of Bedlam. Can you tell us a little about what you got up to while you were there?

Robert McCammon: I got an e-mail from a friend of mine from high school and college, who now lives in Alaska, letting me know about the Bouchercon and asking if I might be interested in coming up. I’d never been to Alaska before, and also never had attended a Bouchercon. During the convention, I went to some panels and I was on a “historical mystery” panel, but I mostly just met other writers and hung around the convention center. Afterward, my friend and his wife showed me around Anchorage and took me to a few places outside the city that he particularly wanted me to see. I’m planning on going back, maybe next summer.

AK: Are you also planning to come to Bouchercon in Baltimore, Maryland, this year?

RM: I don’t know yet, I haven’t thought about it.

AK: The Matthew Corbett books are complex novels with many characters and snaking plots. How do you manage to keep all those complexities straight in your head?

RM: I keep notebooks with a lot of the historical facts that I need, but otherwise I do keep all the story in my head. How do I do that? All I can say is that when I’m writing these books I really “enter another world.” It’s a very intense experience. Almost like an altered reality, I guess.

AK: Do you still write during the night, or have you changed your writing habits?

RM: I do still work at night. It’s after midnight as I’m writing this. The night, and the quiet, is just “my time” to get the writing done.

AK: The ending of Queen of Bedlam suggests that a third volume in the Matthew Corbett series will follow. Why do post-Colonial America and Corbett interest you so much?

RM: The simple answer would be to say that I’ve always been interested in history and also in mystery stories, and that’s certainly part of it. But I [also] wanted to do something that was very different from what I’d done before. I’m very excited about this series, because it has a lot of potential--plus, it’s very challenging and fun to write--but also because I see a lot of potential in developing Matthew’s character. By no means is he going to be a “static” character, meaning that he’s hopefully going to grow and change during the progress of the series. In the new book I’m doing now, he makes a profound mistake and has to pay for it, so he’s certainly not infallible.

AK: The Corbett books are lavish in period detail. Can you tell us something about your research process?

RM: The research is never-ending. You think you know something, and you realize you’ve just scratched the surface. Of course, you don’t have to put everything you’ve learned about a subject in the book, as that wouldn’t be necessary; but the more you know about these period details, the more comfortable you’re going to be writing the story. It’s all about taking the reader there with you. And, having said that, no book set in an historical setting is going to be perfect in its details. Never. You just have to do the best you can, and learn as you’re going along.

AK: I felt that The Queen of Bedlam bore influences from the works of Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe. So tell us a little about your own reading and literary influences over the years.

RM: Well, I absolutely was--and still am--a huge fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and also of course Poe, but I think other influences you could find in the Matthew Corbett books are characters as diverse as James Bond and Tom Swift. Also the fictional detectives Boston Blackie and Ellery Queen. Add to that the more fantastic adventures of Doc Savage. Stir in some shadows from the Hammer film series. And my own love of chapter serials from the 1940s and 1950s. So there really are a lot of different influences--I’d say a lifetime of influences--at work in the Corbett books.

AK: Are there any plans for a British edition of Bedlam, as you have a huge fan base over here? And what about non-English translations of the Corbett books?

RM: You know, I’m not sure about this. I would hope so, sooner or later. Maybe as the series progresses.

AK: Do you ever miss the days when you were one of the world’s biggest-selling horror novelists?

RM: I think I was just mostly what you would call a fairly successful “mid-list” author. Do I miss that? Absolutely not. Now, for sure I still enjoy reading horror, science fiction, and fantasy, because that’s what I began reading as a little boy and that’s what I seemed to always connect with. But I think there’s going to be enough “strange and eerie” atmosphere in the Corbett books to satisfy my appetite for that.

AK: I am still haunted by much of your early work, and Boy’s Life (1991) still echoes in my head decades on. I feel that novel was a pivotal one for you. Would you agree?

RM: Absolutely, though Mine [1990] was also different from what I’d done before. But for sure, I did go in a different direction in Boy’s Life--yet there was still a “strangeness” to it that, as I mentioned above, was true to the books and stories I enjoyed reading as a boy and ultimately made me want to write.

AK: Your departure from the horror genre coincided with it imploding shortly afterward. Why do you think the horror genre died a slow commercial death?

RM: I just lost interest in doing that, speaking of course for myself. It seemed like a very limited area. I mean, there are many writers still in the field who are doing good things, but for me it wasn’t too interesting anymore. I’m not sure if the horror genre has died, though, or if it will ever die. It’s just gone to sleep for a while.

AK: Will we ever get a chance to read The Village, your rumored but as-yet-unpublished novel?

RM: I don’t know. It’s just so different from what I’ve done. And it is very grim, very rough. It’s set in World War II and is not a supernatural horror novel at all. It’s about a troupe of Russian actors who go out on the battlefield to entertain the soldiers and do political plays to make the soldiers fight more fanatically, and then the actors find themselves in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia on a mission they didn’t expect. As I say, it’s not a supernatural horror novel, but it is a novel about the horrors of war. The “village” being the community of actors who come through the course of the book to consider themselves a family.

AK: So tell us about what the future holds for Robert McCammon?

RM: More Matthew Corbett. I’m working on the third book now, and I will say that after the fifth book the series will probably move from America to England and Europe for the last five. I’m excited, because even though I know pretty much how it’s going to develop, there’s still a lot to work out, and I feel like I’m writing a series that I’ve always wanted to read.

Man of Mystery, Part III

(Previous installments of Ali Karim’s appreciation of American author Robert McCammon can be found here.)

By 1988, when I finally got my hands on a copy of Robert McCammon’s award-winning end-of-the-world thriller, Swan Song, I was thoroughly hooked on his brand of fiction. And I was near desperate for more. His eighth novel, Stinger (1988), did not disappoint. Its tale of warring aliens trapping a Texas town in their fight fused elements of H.P. Lovecraft with science-fiction traditions to great affect. Though not as disturbing as Swan Song, Stinger still made the reader question his or her value system.

Then, close on the heels of Stinger’s cosmic horror came McCammon’s take on werewolf legends, in The Wolf’s Hour, a neo-classical horror tragedy wrapped inside a gonzo World War II yarn. I just loved this book as a rollicking great adventure, but it also featured a tragic perspective on life and the meaning of humanity. The story, about a Russian émigré and retired Allied Intelligence agent whose ability to transform himself into a werewolf will come in handy as he seeks information behind enemy lines, might sound a bit ... well, nutty, but trust me when I say that The Wolf’s Hour is a fantastic excursion into action. I just loved it, and you can see the influence of Ian Fleming in the narrative.

In 1989, McCammon wrote an article for Mystery Scene magazine about how he came upon the idea for The Wolf’s Hour:

I began The Wolf’s Hour with the idea that I wanted to do a different kind of werewolf story, coupled with elements of romance and heroism. I wanted my werewolf to be a man who often enjoys being a creature who runs on all fours, with a keen sense of smell and vision. Sometimes, Michael Gallatin would much rather be a wolf than a human being.

I also wanted to do away with some of the conventions of the werewolf tale. I didn’t see any need for werewolves to be restricted to the full moon in order to change, nor did it necessarily have to be night. I wanted to create creatures who had struggled to take control of their situation rather than being at the mercy of their circumstances. Which is not to say that a werewolf’s life is easy; as one of the characters says, “A werewolf never dies of old age.”

As much as possible, I wanted to try to make the development and life of these creatures as believable as possible. Which meant they would learn to endure extreme hardship, because how else could they live but in a wilderness environment? But I think there would be great joy in learning how to see the world as a wolf does, in learning---and it wouldn’t be easy---how to run on all fours and use your tail as a rudder, how to hunt prey and kill it with your teeth and claws, and generally survive on a level that is at the same time both brutal and elegant.

The merging of brutality and elegance is what I was trying to accomplish, and I hope it succeeded reasonably well. The Wolf’s Hour is set during World War II, and goes back and forth in time to show how Michael Gallatin became a werewolf and also follows his current mission in occupied France as a British secret agent. I’ve been asked why I chose World War II as my time frame, and not the modern era. My answer is that the period of the second World War appears to be---wrongly or rightly---a very romantic time in the history of the world. Romantic, that is, in the sense that one knew who wore the black hats and who wore the white hats. It was a period of apocalyptic decisions and events, and more surely the pivotal period of the twentieth century. It seemed right for The Wolf’s Hour, which is basically the tale of nature versus technology.

I also grew up reading the Ian Fleming James Bond novels, and I wanted to create a character who loved life yet had no qualms about killing if the situation demanded it. Michael Gallatin is not a man who kills for pleasure, but he is certainly a dangerous man because he knows---like the wolf does---that killing is basic to his survival. I also wanted Michael Gallatin to be a compassionate man, in that his work and the nature of killing is not his entire focus for being. He is a professional at his craft, but he’s certainly not a machine and I wanted him to have very human emotions.

As I’ve also experienced with F. Paul Wilson’s The Keep (1981), I just love it when Nazis get their butts kicked by the paranormal; and looking at the retail sales of this micro-genre (Supernatural Nazi-Bashing Adventure), I guess I’m not alone.

By the end of the 1980s, I found myself more and more often visiting London specialty bookshops, such as Forbidden Planet. And I became aware that McCammon was publishing many short stories, in addition to his novels. As you might expect, I started collecting horror-fiction anthologies, searching for McCammon’s short-fiction. One of my favorites was “Nightcrawlers,” which was originally published in 1984 and subsequently adapted for broadcast as part of the revived Twilight Zone series.

In 1989, McCammon finally saw published a collection of his short fiction, Blue World, that won many award nominations and was particularly appealing because of its title novella, which is probably this work’s most disturbing piece. McCammon went on from there to edit an anthology containing 17 short stories, entitled Under the Fang (1991), for the newly formed Horror Writers of America (HWA, now the Horror Writers Association). The stories built around the theme of vampires taking over our world.

I heard at the time of Under the Fang’s release that McCammon had been instrumental in setting up the HWA. Writer-critic Stanley Wiater recalls its formation in a piece on the HWA Web site.

As with most great ideas, the concept for a horror writers association originated in the fevered imagination of one individual--in this instance, one Robert R. McCammon. In an interview with Publishers Weekly in 1984, the author (who had already published six horror novels) first publicly expressed his desire for a professional organization specifically geared to the needs of fellow writers of fear. At that point, however, his decidedly colorful name for the then nonexistent organization was “HOWL” (Horror/Occult Writers League.) Even so, reasoned McCammon, mystery writers had their professional organizations, as did science fiction writers. Wasn’t it past time that the equally honorable genre of terror, shock, and the supernatural be formally recognized?

Perhaps more than anyone, McCammon was himself shocked at the subsequent--and often sincere--interest from the media to his remarks, including The New York Times and The Washington Post. Then the B. Dalton and Waldenbooks chains wanted to know more. Horror writers began to hear the HOWL and wrote McCammon to ask where to sign up--though it had always been his intent to first survey every writer he could contact before ever making a formal announcement about the proposed organization. Nevertheless, McCammon was deluged with still more letters of support from writers, editors, and scholars both stateside and overseas ...

Before long, McCammon enlisted the support of two colleagues from Texas who were instrumental in bringing the concept of HOWL snarling into reality: author Joe R. Lansdale and his wife, Karen. They in turn sent out a formal letter of invitation to some 177 writers, of whom 88 subsequently responded with suggestions or a willingness to join.

Just a year after the publication of Under the Fang, two new novels by McCammon were released in Britain, both of them demonstrating a new direction to his writing and making an indelible mark on my psyche. Those works were of course Boy’s Life and Mine, and they spelled the end of his work in the horror genre--but didn’t he leave with a bang! Boy’s Life is probably one of the 10 most remarkable books I’ve ever read. When I got to the end, I actually wept because of the beauty of McCammon’s story and the sheer wonder of how he had constructed this tale of 1950s small-town America. I have recommended Boy’s Life many times over the years and bought copies as presents, and every recipient has come back to thank me for passing along this bewitching tale. At its heart, Boy’s Life is a coming-of-age yarn, but it’s also a mystery, suffused with a little magical-realism, and it packs a full-on emotional punch. In the introduction to Mine, McCammon wrote this about Boy’s Life:

I am probably prouder of Boy’s Life than of any book I’ve ever done. All books are like children, and every child has a different personality. Some are difficult, others companionable, some in a hurry to get where they want to be, others in no particular rush but just content to amble across the hills and meadows of a ripe young world. I hope Boy’s Life has captured some of that young world---a world we all remember, and often yearn to return to in our secret hearts if but for a moment to catch our breaths and right our gyroscopes against the hard iron of reality.

I say Boy’s Life is not about lost innocence, because I believe we all maintain the pool of innocence and wonder inside us no matter how far we get away from our childhood. I believe this pool can be revisited, and we can immerse ourselves in its healing water if we dare to take the risk of knowing again the children we used to be. This is a risky thing, because once we look back---once we let that wonderful pool take us in again---we may not ever fully return to being the adults we are now.

Boy’s Life went on to win both the 1991 Bram Stoker Award and as the 1992 World Fantasy Award. Yet it later generated controversy, when in 2006 a Florida school district questioned its appropriateness as reading material for students. As seems so often to be the case when cries for censorship are raised, the person making the complaint against this book hadn’t actually read it, but had simply found Boy’s Life listed on a Web site about banned books. That site emphasized “bad” language in McCammon’s novel. The author defended his work in person, saying it had been “misinterpreted,” and the school board ended up approving Boy’s Life as well as a number of other challenged works.

Compared with Boy’s Life, Mine--which won the 1990 Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel--was a much darker story and is relevant to today’s terrorism debates. Explaining the background of this novel, McCammon writes:

I sat down to write a ghost story. When I finished, I’d written MINE. Not exactly what I’d started out to do, and certainly not a ghost story in the traditional sense, but a ghost story all the same. MINE is the story of a past era, and a walking dead woman haunted by the specters of what used to be.

Mary Terror, a woman lost in time, yearns for the days of radical militancy and the underground presses, an era of black-light posters, roach clips, strawberry incense and psychedelic dreams. She remembers like the touch of an old lover the violence of those times---the clashes with “the pigs” on college campuses, the Weather Underground’s bombings, the rage of the Black Panthers, the cold calculations of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Her own angry band of brothers and sisters---the Storm Front---is long gone, destroyed by the police in a shootout in 1972 that also took the life of her unborn child. Mary Terror escaped the inferno, and she’s lived alone, on the run from the murders of her past, since 1972. She talks to God in her room, and listens to his commands at thirty-three and a third revolutions per minute. She waits like a coiled-up snake, an arsenal of guns around her, and she sniffs the air for the bitter, hated scent of pigs. Mary Terror is insane. Mary Terror is deadly.

And Mary Terror wants a baby.

Even now, that synopsis and my memories of Mine make me shiver.

However, just at the apex of his early renown, Robert R. McCammon stopped writing. Or at least that’s the way it looked at the time. In 1992, his Gone South reached bookstores in the States, but it was released a year later in the UK. This was a strange novel, blending a thriller plot with a gonzo-chase story. Commenting on how he came up with the plot for Gone South, McCammon writes:

I think the idea began five or six years ago, the first time I saw a man standing on the street, holding a sign that said “Will Work For Food.” Sometime after that, I read a magazine account of Vietnam veterans who had been contaminated by Agent Orange and were dying. I walked into a bookstore in New Orleans maybe a year after that and found a fascinating and very strange tome about freaks that included an old sepia-tone photo of a man with three arms. Also on that same trip, I took a tour of the swamp---not for any particular book, but for my own education. Later on, I watched an interesting TV show on PBS about Elvis Presley impersonators. One night on CNN, I saw a report on a Vietnam veteran who’d gone berserk and shot a couple of people, and the newscaster said that the man had been out of work for several months.

And this is how it happens. Gone South was starting to come together.

Gone South is on one level the story of a man on the run from a tragic mistake, but on another level it’s the story of a man moving toward something that he doesn’t fully understand. Its basic premise is that you can start out in one direction, and life and circumstances take you another way entirely, and sometimes all you can do is hang on for the ride. Gone South is about the pressures and uncertainties of life, the unfairness of it all; but it’s also about toughness, and faith, and finding a way through the thorniest maze to find some kind of answer.

As always, I ate up McCammon’s latest novel with relish. And I looked forward to his next offering. But what came was ... nothing. The author would remain silent for the next decade, ostensibly having retired from publishing, and his absence was nearly unbearable. There was no information about what came next, and McCammon didn’t issue any interviews. Rumors were plentiful and all over the map, but no one really knew why he had stopped writing. It was only thanks to Hunter Goatley’s unofficial Robert McCammon Web site, Lights Out!, that I finally learned in the late ’90s that McCammon would be returning. And with style.

(To be continued)

Man of Mystery, Part II

(The first installment of Ali Karim’s appreciation of author Robert McCammon can be found here.)


After discovering American writer Robert McCammon’s work in 1979, when I purchased a paperback copy of his debut novel, Baal (1978), and then being so enraptured by his 1987 book, Swan Song, I was desperate for more from his pen. But I was certainly not the only one.

As I explained previously, I have been in contact for close to a decade with McCammon’s friend and dedicated Web master, Hunter Goatley (shown above with singer-songwriter Alice Cooper). Goatley is now a 44-year-old computer programmer living in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and working on an anti-spam product for Process Software. His contribution in keeping McCammon’s readers informed about this author’s work over the years cannot be overlooked. I had the chance recently to ask Goatley some questions about his long friendship with McCammon, and to seek his insights into this important writer. As well, I asked Goatley what it takes to manage his enthusiastic and informative McCammon Web site, which has been such a valuable resource for McCammon enthusiasts over the years.

Ali Karim: When did you first discovered Robert McCammon’s work.

Hunter Goatley: When perusing the racks at a local bookstore in 1981, I saw the cover of the Avon edition of They Thirst, with its lurid, pale, fanged face. At the time, Stephen King was my favorite author, and I was always looking for other horror novels that looked good. It’s said that you should never judge a book by its cover, but people do, and I did too, in this case. And I wasn’t led astray by it. When Mystery Walk came out [in 1983], I knew that this McCammon fellow was no fluke.

AK: And how did you come to launch the Lights Out! fanzine?

HG: With each successive novel, McCammon just got better, and my appreciation for his novels grew. By the time Swan Song was published, McCammon had replaced King as my favorite author, and I tried to collect everything I could find. As more of McCammon’s short stories started appearing, and as his popularity grew, I thought it would be great if someone published a newsletter to let fans know about upcoming works. I mentioned my idea to Dave Hinchberger, owner of the Overlook Connection, who knew McCammon, and he passed it on to McCammon, who was receptive to it. I decided it would be fun to do it myself, so a couple of weeks later, I wrote a letter to McCammon with my formal proposal, asking for both his permission and his help. He was very enthusiastic about it, and I started making plans for the first issue.

AK: For how long was Lights Out! published in fanzine form?

HG: The first issue was published in July 1989. There were a total of six issues published, with the last appearing in October 1991. The newsletter eventually took more of my time and money than I could afford to give it, and its end coincided with McCammon’s plans to take a bit of a break when his daughter was born.

AK: Can I assume you’re an information technology type of guy?

HG: Yes, I’m a computer programmer. Lights Out! gave me a chance to do something for fun at a time when I was under a lot of stress from my job.

AK: Which of McCammon’s novels strike a chord with you, and why?

HG: I enjoy them all, of course, but I’d have to say Boy’s Life [1991] and Speaks the Nightbird [2002] are at the top of the list. Boy’s Life is, without a doubt, the most magical, touching book I’ve read--a true masterpiece. The novel’s story is set [in] the year I was born, but it still seemed to capture so many aspects of my own childhood--the feelings and experiences of growing up. I find Speaks the Nightbird to be very similar, in that it’s also a great coming-of-age tale, but the historical setting makes it even more interesting.

Among his short fiction, “Night Calls the Green Falcon” and “Blue World” (the novella) have fantastic protagonists with whom I could readily identify, despite being nothing like either of them, and feel what was happening in the stories.

AK: Looking at your Robert McCammon Web site, I assume you are a collector of his work. Is that right?

HG: Yes, I am. Many, but not all, of the cover scans in the cover gallery on the site came from my own collection.

AK: How much work is involvled in running that Web site, and how many e-mails do you receive each week from McCammon’s readers?

HG: The amount of work varies, depending on what’s new to report. With the publication [in October 2007] of The Queen of Bedlam, I’ve been pretty busy posting links to new reviews and new interviews. On average these days, I’d say I spend five or six hours a week maintaining the site and looking for news. The amount of McCammon-related e-mail I receive varies weekly, but there’s always a steady stream. It’s a rare day when I don’t get at least one message from a reader. Connecting with other McCammon fans is one of the things I enjoy most about running the Web site.

AK: When and where did you first meet Robert Rick McCammon? And can you tell us a little about that encounter?

HG: My first contact was through a fan letter I wrote in 1984 after I read Mystery Walk. He replied to my letter, which really impressed me.

After my letter proposing Lights Out!, McCammon called me to talk about the newsletter. I was living in Utah at the time, and figured I’d be lucky to ever get to meet him. But I was lucky, and when I had to take a business trip in January 1989, I was able to arrange an overnight layover in Birmingham, Alabama, to meet Rick. He graciously offered to pick me up at the airport, and in his home that evening, we conducted the interview that appeared in the first issue of Lights Out! (and that can now be found on the McCammon Web site). I was very nervous about the meeting, but Rick and his wife, Sally, made me feel quite at home. Over time, we became good friends.

AK: The original Web site for Robert McCammon was Lights Out! So why did it go offline for a while?

HG: When McCammon announced his retirement in 1999, he asked me to shut down the Web site. He didn’t feel that there was any point in having a site when he didn’t plan to write any new novels.

AK: And the relaunch? Did that coincide with McCammon’s return in 2002 with the Matthew Corbett novels?

HG: Yes. When I received the phone call in which he told me that Speaks the Nightbird was going to published, we discussed relaunching the Web site to help promote the book. Now that the Matthew Corbett series is continuing, I’ll be continuing to run the site to help provide news and information for fans and new readers.

AK: Why do you think McCammon’s work is so popular?

HG: I think there are a couple of reasons. One is that his words paint pictures more vividly than any other author I’ve read. He’s very adept at thoroughly describing a scene with an economy of words. The other is his ability to create a wide variety of characters with great depth. When you read a McCammon novel, you really know and care about the characters, even those that are background characters. McCammon combines those factors with a good sense of humor, exciting action scenes, intriguing mysteries, and some real insights into life to make great novels.

AK: Who else do you read in your spare time? And what books have you enjoyed over the last year?

HG: I’ve mostly been reading thrillers and historical novels recently. My favorite authors besides McCammon include George Chesbro (whose Web site I also run), Stephen Hunter, Gregg Hurwitz, T. Jefferson Parker, Robert B. Parker, Mark Billingham, Ronald Kelly, and Michael Slade. Over the past year, I’ve discovered the Tudor England mysteries of C.J. Sansom, and I recently finished Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth. I look forward to reading more historical mysteries in the coming years.

AK: And finally, how important do you think it is for a writer today to have an Internet presence?

HG: I think it’s pretty important if you’re a writer looking for readers. The Internet has become such a major part of everyone’s lives that people now tend to look for author sites when they read books they enjoy. Most of the advertising for The Queen of Bedlam has been Internet-based, and I’ve heard from dozens of readers who wouldn’t have known about the new books if they hadn’t found the McCammon site or seen mentions [of the novel] on other sites.

(To be continued)

Man of Mystery, Part I

He is a writer who helped get me through my difficult teenage years and altered my perspective on the world as it was then; he continues to have the same affect on me with his latest work. His fiction, in my opinion, provides remarkable insight into the madness we call life. As a person, he is enigmatic, modest, and deeply private. Yet he also sits among the very best authors of mystery and horror novels working today.

He is Robert McCammon.

Beginning with this post, and in three more to come, I shall look back with pleasure over the 56-year-old McCammon’s lengthy career and try to understand why his work continues to strike a resonant chord in so many readers. Along the way, I’ll speak with McCammon’s old friend and Web master, Hunter Goatley (who, with McCammon’s wife, Sally, was invaluable in making all of this happen); review the author’s remarkable historical thriller The Queen of Bedlam (released late last year); and, in a rare interview, talk with McCammon himself about his latest novel, his nighttime writing routine, his debts to Sherlock Holmes, and his long-ago departure from the horror genre. It was hard persuading American author McCammon to talk about his life and work, but his insights are valuable to readers of both mystery and horror fiction. And conducting our interview gave me the opportunity to thank him personally for the enjoyment his work has given me over the last three decades.

So, without further ado, let us begin.

* * *

Do you recall the very first Internet search you ever did? Well, I do. It was in the summer of 1997. My younger brother had recommended that I try the search engine AltaVista, and as I stared at the page’s search box, I wondered what to inquire about.

Then I remembered that I’d been wondering for several years what had happened to award-winning novelist Robert McCammon. So I typed his name into the search box and found a Web site at the top of the results entitled Lights Out!, which took its name from a line in McCammon’s novel Swan Song (winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Best Horror Novel of 1987). I soon crawled all the way through this amazing Web resource, which was obviously a huge labor of love. I spent hours at the site, as I was then still on a dial-up connection (weren’t we all in the 1990s?). There was so much I learned about McCammon’s work from Lights Out!, because in those early Internet day there were only print magazines and fanzines writing much about him. McCammon, despite having sold a great number of books around the world, was rarely interviewed, so I knew very little about this man on whose fiction I had spent so much hard-earned cash.

The Web site, I learned, was an extension of the unofficial Robert McCammon newsletter, Lights Out!, published between 1989 and 1991. Having myself been involved in fanzine work during the late 1970s and ’80s, I e-mailed the Web master, Hunter Goatley. Soon, a long-distance friendship developed between he and I. We traded rare editions of McCammon’s books and e-mailed each other with McCammon news, as we were (and still are) both avid collectors of his work. But most importantly, Goatley kept my passion for McCammon’s writing alive (as he has apparently done for many other followers of this author). Goatley’s dedication to and enthusiasm for McCammon’s work at the short-lived Light’s Out! fanzine (back issues are available here in PDF format) and Web site were crucial during the period between 1993 to 2002, when McCammon “retired” from publishing. Interest in his fiction, however--even during that prolonged hiatus--has never waned, because once you read one of his novels, you’re hooked. It’s as simple as that.

Now, let’s go back a bit. When did my passion for Robert McCammon’s work begin? As I wrote on this page in the fall of 2006, when I had the opportunity to meet Stephen King, I was always an avid reader and was very fond of all things Gothic during the horror genre boom in the late 1970s. I was such an avid reader, that I would hunt through secondhand bookstores (remember them?) to feed my habit, balancing carefully my very tight budget. I guess people were amused seeing me hang out at the library with my big satchel, carting books to and fro and telling people about the books I’d read.

Christmas came early for me, as a teenager in December 1979, when I purchased a paperback copy of McCammon’s debut novel, Baal (1978), with its scary green British cover (at right). It was an angry and disturbing book, and McCammon’s prose made me stand to attention. Like some of his later writing, it dealt with apocalyptic issues, be they person or global; but in the case of Baal, both sorts of apocalypse were offered. I still remember the hairs on the back of neck bristling when I read that book, realizing that it was no pulpy creature feature. No, because hidden between McCammon’s early paragraphs was genuine insight. And isn’t that really what we read books for--insight, and seeing how others view human existence?

McCammon wrote in 1988 about his experiences in producing Baal:

Baal is about power, written at a time when I had none. I was twenty-five years old when I wrote Baal, and working at a department store in my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. My job was ferrying advertising proofs between the local newspaper and the various department heads: “traffic control,” they called it. When I went home at night, I sat down at my old Royal typewriter---long since deceased---and worked on the novel that would become Baal.

People often ask me where I get my ideas for characters. I always say that each character, whether male or female, is put together from observation, memory, and is part of the author too. I really believe there’s part of me in all my characters---and not only the good ones. The character of Baal---with his unleashed wild power and his ability to do just about anything he pleases---is certainly part of what I was feeling at that time in my life. I was an electric plug and I couldn’t seem to find the right socket, until I began writing.

After so enjoying Baal, I waited for its follow-up. And waited some more. In that pre-Internet era, there was scant information available to the general public about when and what books were due to be published. I finally got friendly with a local librarian, who checked catalogues for me and ordered me books by writers I enjoyed. It wasn’t until 1980 that I finally got my hands on McCammon’s second published novel, Bethany’s Sin, a cautionary tale of small-town evil (and, might I note, a painful read for males--if you’ve experienced it, you know what I mean). I devoured that very haunting yarn in a single sitting. (Only many years later did I learn that thriller writer Simon Kernick [Severed] also counts Bethany’s Sin as one of his favorite horror novels of all time.)

It was only a year later that The Night Boat (written right after Baal, but published third in order) found its way into bookstores in the UK. The Night Boat was a classic horror tale about a submerged U-boat, complete with an evil presence left aboard from World War II--one far more sinister than Nazism alone. McCammon wrote about this work in a preface to the 1998 paperback re-issue of The Night Boat:

I am also fascinated by machines. Particularly ships and submarines. I can imagine nothing more grim than to be two hundred feet underwater in a leaking, moldering submarine. They didn’t call them Iron Coffins for nothing, and it took iron-willed men to survive in them. Most of the German submarine crews didn’t.

The Night Boat is a mixture of dream and nightmare. A dream in that the location, the colors, the language are idyllic; nightmarish because the Night Boat invades the dream and destroys it. I took scuba-diving lessons in researching The Night Boat, but I wasn’t able to afford a trip to the Caribbean. It amazes me still that a review I got for the book went to lengths to say how accurate the reviewer thought I’d gotten the cadences of island language. I listened to many hours of calypso music and spoken Caribbean dialect records.

Events and impressions in an author’s everyday life are always mirrored in the work he or she is doing at the time. While I was writing The Night Boat, I lived in a cramped little roachhole of an apartment on Birmingham’s Southside. Honestly, I could hear the roaches running wild in the ceiling over my bed as I tried to sleep. And my upstairs neighbors played their stereo at an ungodly volume all hours of the night, so round about two or three in the morning you could hear the other neighbors banging on their walls to get the music shut down. That weird, rhythmic hammering in the early hours remained with me and found its way into The Night Boat. When the crew hammers at the rotting hulk of the submarine, it’s actually irate neighbors at two o’clock in the morning trying to get Led Zeppelin silenced. The roaches in the ceiling I saved for another book.

Just a few months more passed before the paperback-original release of McCammon’s vampire opus, They Thirst (1981), set in contemporary Los Angeles. This was a contrast to Stephen King’s vampire opus, Salem’s Lot (1975), which was set in small-town America. McCammon wrote later about why he set his tale of modern vampires under the big lights of California’s largest city:

It has always interested me that from time to time I meet someone who has read They Thirst and lives in Los Angeles. They usually want to know how long I lived there, because certainly I had to be a native of L.A. to get all those streets and landmarks correct. The truth is that I visited Los Angeles for an intensive weekend of research. I trundled off in my rented car on the freeways, maps in hand, and went to every location that I’d already decided needed to be in the book. It was my first trip to Los Angeles, I was there alone, and I was staying in a Hispanic hotel in downtown L.A. that supposedly had been a mecca for stars back in the 1920s. At least that’s what the guidebook said. Valentino had a suite there. I fear he wouldn’t recognize the place now.

But I spent most of my time like a real native--on the road. And while I was in Los Angeles, I read a magazine article about runaways that seemed to me to hit the heart of the atmosphere I was after.

A young girl who’d run away from her home in the Midwest was talking to the reporter, telling him where she lived. It was a shuttered-up motel near the Strip, she said. She and her friends crashed in the rooms on an upper floor. They had mattresses to sleep on, and they panhandled on the Strip for drug money. It was okay. Like another society, just different. But, she said, she and her friends didn’t have anything to do with the men who lived down in the motel’s basement. She couldn’t understand how anybody could live like those men did, down in that place with no light. She said they did ... terrible things. But hey, live and let live, right?

After that, readers received the first hints of McCammon’s Southern Gothic heritage--two books, Mystery Walk (1983) and Usher’s Passing (1985) that were released in paperback in Britain a year after their hardcover publication. McCammon’s introduction to that latter novel tells of his own reading influences.

When I was a child, one of my favorite tales was Edgar Allan Poe’s “[The] Fall of the House of Usher.” I could see Roderick roaming the gloomy halls of the ancestral mansion, could see his sister Madeline rising from the family vault, could see the fissure that finally cracked the house as it collapsed beneath stormy waters.

But what if the story didn’t end there?

What if Roderick and Madeline had a brother who carried the Usher name into the future? What if the generations of Ushers created a business empire that not only changed American society but could destroy civilization as well?

And what if the present-day Usher descendant realizes that five generations of his family have concealed a secret so terrible that it long ago drove Roderick Usher to insanity, and so terrible that it now threatens to drag him down into the dark cauldron of the Usher heritage?

In Usher’s Passing, each generation has a tale to tell, and their stories move across time to lead Rix Usher into the haunted heart of Usherland, where he must face both who he is--and what he is.

Usher’s Passing grew out of love for both the craft of horror fiction and its master, Edgar Allan Poe. I hope you too are drawn into the complex web of events Poe began.

McCammon’s links to the Southern Gothic literary tradition, and his love of Poe’s work, would show up again later and quite clearly in his Matthew Corbett novels.

As much as I’d enjoyed this novelist’s previous work, it was Swan Song (1987) that completely knocked my socks off. I had to wait a full year after its publication in America to get my hands on a copy, with its wonderfully surreal cover. That cover still haunts me today, as does McCammon’s narrative about the end of the world brought on by a nuclear weapons exchange. For all the nightmares this book caused, it also made me view life from a completely different perspective. The plot revolves around the madness that ensues when a dark force intervenes with humanity, triggering events that result in the launching of nuclear missiles. The result of this violence is a Mad Max-like world beset by radiation poisoning, rampant disease, warfare, black skies, and gangs of marauding mutants. Groups of survivors are left to negotiate hell on Earth--or maybe hell of an Earth. There were scenes of brutality, scenes that make the heart pound, and scenes that brought me to tears. Swan Song is a huge book in terms of ambition, ideas, and compassion, all suffused with a deep anger toward humanity. Yet right at the story’s core is what we all need to have when facing disaster: hope.

This novel has often been compared with Stephen King’s The Stand (1978), but primarily because King’s work also details an apocalyptic event (in his case, a flu virus) that decimates mankind, and he then goes on to describe how the human survivors cope in the new world order. I can see how writing a book such as Swan Song--plus the comparisons, in many cases negative, to his fellow writer King--took a toll on McCammon’s mind. In a 1989 essay for Mystery Scene magazine, he had much to say about his many difficulties in composing that particular novel:

For me, writing is a great freedom. I don’t use an outline. I don’t usually know what’s going to happen from one point to another, though I develop what I call “signpost scenes” as a kind of free-form roadmap. Writing is a great adventure, a journey of faith into the unknown. Sometimes it’s a night trip, and you lose your way for a while. But when you get to your destination, and see the home fires burning, the joy is beyond description.

I almost gave it up, a while back. I got really tired of hearing things like “the poor man’s Stephen King,” and that I was “walking on King and [Peter] Straub’s territory,” that I was a rip-off artist and a hack with no style of my own. I almost said to hell with it, and for a while I was looking through the want ads trying to figure what else I could do.

When I reached the bottom of that particular pond, I realized there was nothing else I could do besides write. For better or worse, I was married to writing, and I had to keep going no matter what was shoveled at me.

I’m only glad he didn’t give, because Robert McCammon still had so much more to offer as a novelist.

(To be continued)