Horror Street: Interview with Jeff Strand

Interview with Jeff Strand:
[Alessandro manzetti] You have always had the passion for writing, ever since you are childhood. Alaska, Spider Man and Falstaff, what they mean for you? Which is the moment when you realized this passion was turning into a real job?
[Jeff Strand] I lived in Fairbanks, Alaska until I was fifteen, though ironically, I think it was my eight years living in Ohio that made me vow never to live in cold weather again. Bowling Green, Ohio has wind that is so cold that it might as well be stabbing you with icicles. I was an obsessive Spider-Man fanatic when I was a kid, though I wasn't introduced to the character from the comics but rather a TV show called The Electric Company. Spider-Man is one of the chattiest superheroes around, but on The Electric Company he was completely mute, except for comic book-style thought bubbles. Instead of people like Doctor Octopus and the Green Goblin, he would defeat evil-doers who did ghastly things like stealing letters out of words. When I was in the fifth grade, I wrote a series of short stories featuring Falstaff the Fearless, one of which was published in a special section of The Daily News Miner that featured stories by kids. I didn't realize that "Falstaff" was a Shakespeare reference; I'd swiped the name from the Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook!
[AM] Success comes with your novel Pressure (2006). A disturbing psychological thriller that tells a story of friendship that becomes an unstoppable path of blood and horror, from childhood to adulthood. Pressure is the right title, is precisely the emotion that you transfer to the reader, a pressure that rises steadily after each page. Who is the ideal reader of Pressure? What is he looking for?
[JS] The ideal reader is anybody who's looking for a character-focused thriller or horror novel. Pressure goes to some very dark places, but it's definitely my most mainstream book. Somebody who just wants a fun beach read with a couple of scares may not enjoy it, because some pretty darn awful things happen, but I think that for the most part, if you like thrillers and horror novels and don't mind one that's a little disturbing, you're the target audience for Pressure.

[AM] You have written many short stories, in your collection Gleefully Macabre Tales your humor finds space and thickness, perfectly balanced within the genre. What is your relationship with this form of fiction? Do the short stories offer more freedom and opportunity to express some of your characteristics?
[JS] Every short story I've written for the past ten years has been for a specific market; I never just come up with an idea and say "Hey, I'm going to write a short story!" When I come up with ideas out of nowhere, they're always novel ideas--I have to work to come up with a great idea for a short story. But, yes, they definitely offer more freedom. I can write from the point of view of truly reprehensible characters, or write stories that are far sillier and more surreal than what I'd want to do in a full-length novel. Something like "Burden" is so bleak that I'd never want to sustain that tone for a full book, and a story like "Mr. Twitcher's Miracle Baby-Chopping Machine" is far more bizarre than anything I write in a novel. Given the choice to write only novels or only short stories, I'd definitely pick novels, but short stories do offer the chance to experiment and have a lot of fun.
[AM] If your life were a book, what would be the title, and how would the cover be illustrated?
[JS] It would be called Writing Books Isn't Nearly As Exciting As You Think It Is, and the cover would be me sitting in front of a computer, just staring at the screen. If you bought the collector's edition hardcover, you could see on the screen that I was goofing around on Facebook.
[AM] In your novel Dweller (2010) you return to the theme of friendship, telling an unusual relationship between a boy and a monster, a humanoid creature.  You talk about diversity, loneliness, you force the reader to wonder who is really the monster. Dweller is not clichè horror novel, and it is full of allegories. How did you make plausible this story, the existence of the creature and his friendship with a human? It 's a very different novel from Pressure, you wanted to reach a different reader target?
[JS] When I first came up with the idea, I'd thought about having a reptilian creature living in a well...but with that kind of premise, the story immediately becomes pure fantasy. To make it more plausible, I changed it to a Bigfoot-like beast. The friendship between Toby the boy and Owen the monster evolves very slowly, and I put a lot of thought into how that relationship could sustain itself over fifty or sixty years, especially after Toby grows up and doesn't really need to hang out with a forest monster. What I love most about Dweller is that when people hear the premise, they think "How could that possibly work?" But readers really seem to be believing the relationship and enjoying the book. Dweller was written specifically for the Leisure Books horror line, which had just published Pressure, so I was going for the exact same target audience. The last thing I want to do is write the same book over and over again, and with Dweller I focused much more on emotional impact (it's the first book I've written where I tried to make the reader cry) but I wasn't trying to go for a different set of readers. I just wanted to give the same set of readers a very different experience.

[AM] Would you rather go to dinner with a literary agent for a major contract or have the powers of Spider-Man for an hour?
[JS] That is the most difficult question I've ever had to answer! The responsible, mature thing to do would be to take the contract, but I'm afraid I'd have to go with the Spider-Man powers for an hour. So...can you really make it happen, or was this just an interview question?
[AM] Tell us something about your latest novels Mandibles and Wolf Hunt, and about your new projects
[JS] Mandibles is a new edition of one of my older novels, with a brand-new cover and some minor revisions. It's about giant killer ants going on a rampage in Tampa, Florida. You probably don't need to know much more than that. If you like the idea of a novel about giant ants killing a bunch of people, you will enjoy Mandibles. If you think that sounds stupid, it's not the book for you. Wolf Hunt is about two thugs named George and Lou who are hired to transport a man in a cage. They're told he's a werewolf. He is. He escapes. Bad things happen. It's a gory, funny mix of crime novel and horror story. Another recent book is my very dark fairy tale, Fangboy. Coming up at the end of this year I've got a suspense novella called Faint of Heart, and next summer I have a young adult horror/comedy called A Bad Day For Voodoo. Plus a bunch of other stuff.

[AM] and now two Horror Street Classic questions:
In this heading we try to learn about new landscape of horror literature, through direct experience of the authors. What are the new trend of horror? Could you name some new authors who are conducting original projects?
[JS] Obviously, the whole zombie trend is still going strong, though I think the mash-up trend (Moby Dick With Zombies!) is starting to fade. With self-publishing becoming more and more "legitimate," we will hopefully start seeing a lot more wildly original projects that don't have to pass through the marketing department. Right now, despite the freedom that self-publishing provides an author, we're still mostly seeing the same stuff. (I don't excuse myself from that--my four self-published novels are about vampires, zombies, werewolves, and giant bugs.)
[AM] We leave the reader to imagine of walking along a dark and lonely road going back home, and having to turn the corner. Who (or what) does he find around the corner?
[JS] A clown. With claws. And fangs. And a chainsaw.
Thanks Jeff for being the guest of Il Posto Nero
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Profile: Jeff Strand was born December 14, 1970 in Baltimore, Maryland. He wrote many short stories published in the collection Gleefully Macabre Tales (Stoker Award 2008 Best Collection finalist), and novels, like Pressure (Stoker Award 2006 Best Novel finalist), Dweller (Stoker Award 2010 Best Novel finalist), Mandibles, Wolf Hunt.