Weekend Interview

Can you think of a better place to hang out this weekend than the League of Reluctant Adults headquarters? Me either, so I dropped by the other day and had a nice little chat with up-and-coming urban fantasy overlord Mark Henry. Actually he dangled a bottle of Knob Creek in front of my face and when I woke up he had the whole confession typed up and awaiting my signature. I do vaguely remember saying some of this stuff as my head sunk back into my luxurious League club chair.

Meanwhile, don't be afraid to hang solo with Mark, over at Burlesque of the Damned. You'll come for the 80s horror movie trailers; you'll stay for the dip.

Win a free EAT THE DARK audiobook!

According to my friends at Tantor, the audiobook for Eat the Dark is due out in November. Now I don't know about you, but for my money, any horror story that takes place in pitch dark would be awesome to listen to on audio. Think about it -- your turn down the lights, put on your headphones and hit PLAY. Boom. Instant chills.

And now, more good news.

I plan on giving away multiple copies of Eat the Dark on audio in what promises to be the most exciting contest ever run on Scary Parent.

The rules are simple.

If you read Chasing the Dead in hardcover (and everybody out there did, right?) then you may remember that the main character remembers a few rather sinister-sounding lines from Margaret Wise Brown's classic The Big Red Barn:

And in the barn is a bale of hay.
And that is where the children play.
But in this story the children are away.
Only the animals are here today.

Well, for reasons too convoluted to explain, when it came time for the paperback, I was forced to substitute my own sinister-sounding children's book rhyme, from a made-up boardbook called Bedtime Pets. You can check 'em out for yourself in the mass market, if you want.

So anyway, here's the contest. Put on your most evil Dr. Seuss thinking caps, and come up with the creepiest excerpt from a children's book that you can think of. If you want, you can use actual children's books that sound creepy to you, but I'll be giving big-time extra bonus points for people that make up their own. And remember, when it comes to creepy kids books, the more ominous and less overtly evil, the better.

Send your stuff to joeschreiber1@yahoo.com. Winners -- I'll pick, say, five -- get free Eat the Dark audiobooks, sometime in November. And all the best entries get their spooky posted right here on the Scary Parent.

Oh, the places you'll go...screaming all the way.

Paperback writer

Tomorrow, 9/25, the mass market paperback edition of Chasing the Dead comes out. Unlike the hardcover, which was mainly available at Borders, B&N and independent bookstores -- and, of course, Amazon -- the mass market will hopefully get more exposure along the lines of supermarkets, airports and Wal Mart. My people at Ballantine have mentioned some initial orders, and they're quite happy with the numbers. I'm happy because Chasing is exactly the kind of paperback horror novel I used to pick up and read in grocery stores when I was a kid, and it seems like the perfect place for it. The library is a wonderful place, but they didn't have the kinds of stuff I found at Family Foods while my mom was doing the weekly shopping -- scary, slick-looking mass markets with terrifying cover art and genuinely creepy copy on the back cover. I remember standing with my head pressed against the rack, pulling off books and skimming through them, one after another.

As a bonus, Ballantine is including the first chapter of Eat the Dark at the back of the mass market. It's also the first time that the web address for the Scary Parent blog will be mentioned anywhere. So if you're here for the first time, welcome.

You might want to adjust the brightness on your screen.

It's going to get dark soon.

Nightmare Alley

William Lindsay Gresham's horrific carny noir Nightmare Alley came out a little over sixty years ago. Let's kick off the weekend by listening to him describe the carnival folk asleep on a train, through the point of view hapless antihero Stan Carlisle:

How helpless they all looked in the ugliness of sleep. A third of life spent unconscious and corpselike. And some, the great majority, stumbled through their waking hours scarcely more awake, helpless in the face of destiny. They stumbled down a dark alley toward their deaths. They sent exploring feelers into the light and met fire and writhed back again into the darkness of their blind groping.

Beautiful. Just beautiful.

First Novels

How do you know when it's time to start writing your first novel?

Last week, I blogged about some of the early short stories I wrote back in high school. The spring and summer of my senior year, that was 1987, when Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet owned the airwaves and the coolest hangout in front of the frozen yogurt place. That summer I was introduced to the dubious pleasures of vodka, acid washed jeans and being unsucessfully seduced by the assitant manager of the sportswear shop where I was working. Very adult stuff. Writing wise, I decided it was time to try something more ambitious.

So, for the next several months, I began filling Mead spiral notebooks -- yeah, I was writing longhand -- with what I had no doubt would be a masterpiece for the ages. It would be supernatural, obviously, with as much cool shit as I could possibly jam into three hundred pages. Perhaps coherence or even narrative logic was a little much to expect at this point, but I had energy to burn. I had just polished off Hunter S. Thompson's Hells Angels, and I wanted to combine a motorcycle gang story with the tale of a vengeful, Old Testament God gone completely amok, trapping a motley assortment of individuals in a church in the face of possible apocalypse. My title was taken from Jonathan Edwards' fire-and-brimstone sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God": I called it An Angry God.

Looking back twenty years, it's not easy to remember the exact circumstances from which this manuscript came into being, but I remember my mindset at the time, a kind of intensity of purpose and brute satisfaction that, to my 37-year-old mindset, appears almost frankly sexual. In making up stories -- especially sprawling ones that allowed me a dangerous breadth of scope -- I had found something that brought me more immediate and lingering gratification than anything I'd ever experienced. From the first sentence of that first novel, I decided, on a purely subconscious level:

A) I was put on this earth to write novels.
B) I was going to keep writing, every chance I got.
C) I would continue writing, regardless of whether or not I achieved any success, for as long as could.

Did those unspoken, unthought-of tenets of faith sustain me through the writing of that first book? Hell yes, and more. It was like a kid filling up his first hot rod with rocket fuel. I wrote until my hand throbbed and got calluses on the inside of the second finger that never went away. I went through ballpoints and notebooks and rewrites, and I spent a long time marveling that it had taken me this long to stumble across something that made me feel this good.

I'm not exactly sure how long it took me, but when I was done, I was proud as hell. I spent the following weeks going over to my friend Steve Kuperberg's house to borrow his brand new, super cool Macintosh computer to type it all up on MacWrite. Some days I got there so early that Steve's dad caught me knocking on the back door while he was still in his bathrobe. "Stephen's still sleeping," his dad said patiently, "but you can use the computer." And up I went. (I would not have my own word processor for another three years, when I was a college senior.) I typed up the entire thing, editing as I went, and when I was done, I printed it up on the dot-matrix, which is still the coolest way a novel can emerge, in one long, connected scroll.

In the end, not a lot of people read that first novel. I'm not sure I wanted them to. My initial sense of energy and euphoria had burned off, and as I packed my stuff to head off to college (and got my hair permed into a kind of apple-scented pseudo-mullet, oh yeah, another great idea), I felt suddenly very shy about what I had once thought was the greatest thing in the world. Several people did end up reading it, though, including my friend Mike Ludy, under odd circumstances that resulted in one of the most encouraging compliments I've ever received. Mike was driving an old beater at the time, somewhere between Ann Arbor and Kalamazoo, and he had the manuscript in the passenger seat. The car would overheat on him and he'd have to pull over for a few minutes, and read some of An Angry God while the engine cooled. "I got the point where I was almost kind of hoping it would overheat on me again," he told me, "so I could keep reading."

As odd as it sounds, that comment stuck with me, and it does now. Because it factors directly into the opening question of this blog -- how do you know when it's time to start writing your first novel? I don't think it has to do with achieving any degree of technical mastery, or even any particular confidence in your idea. I think, especially when you're starting out, that the time to start your first novel is when your enthusiasm for the project, or even for the act of writing itself, is so powerful that it can't help but overcome the inevitable lack of expertise. I'm talking about a sense of balls-out narrative adrenaline so powerful that it can't help but infect that reader, the same way a pop song sticks in your head, no matter how much you might hate the bone-headed derivative simplicity of it.

A writer starting out doesn't have much in his or her arsenal -- many of the tools of the craft don't come for a long time. And although it pains me to admit it, these tools arrive on their own schedule, often regardless of the passion or determination that writer brings to the work. But the one thing that I think everybody needs starting out is enthusiasm. That, and a thick skin, will get you through all manner of hardships to come. And luck doesn't hurt either. There's no winning combination, but there are certain vital ingredients, and I think these qualify.

Coda: Those original notebooks disappeared for years, but in 1994, when I was back in Michigan for a book signing, Steve Kuperberg showed up with all of them, intact, and handed them back to me. Even my handwriting looked different back then. But there's no mistaking what was going on in the young man that filled those pages with his story.

He was having the time of his life.

Interlude 1968

Travel back in time with us to a magical era where pot-bellied Norman Mailer attempts to remove Rip Torn's ear while his children cry and his wife screams. Why couldn't I have been a celebrity novelist in those heady Easthampton days?

The First Five

I started writing short stories when I was in junior high school. I probably wrote a hundred of them, either longhand or on the portable typewriter my mom gave me. Like a lot of writers of my generation, I took my main influence from Stephen King, X-Men comics and the Heavy Metal movie. Many of these masterworks were unfinished, and the ones that I did finish were often such floundering abortions that I couldn't stand to read them over again and threw them out. Mercifully, I've forgotten them.

There were, however, a few standouts that, for various reasons, linger in my memory. Five, to be exact. Look closely, and you might see glimpses of the writer I'm still becoming:

"Fish Food" (1984): A snooty food critic with a taste for the bizarre eats his weight in raw fish eggs. After savagely berating his wife in a fancy restaurant, the fellow somehow incubates the eggs inside his stomach and bursts open, spewing out hundreds of wriggling fish in front of horrified diners.

"Quiet Advice for Those Traveling Back Roads" (1985): A first-person story-within-a-story about a truck driver who picks up a mysterious woman, who tells him about her husband, whose basement mushroom collection slowly mutated him into a fungus. Basically stolen wholesale from an old Gahan Wilson cartoon, this understated classic won runner-up in Twilight Zone Magazine's short story contest midway through Reagan's second term. Another runner-up that year: future superstar Poppy Z. Brite.

"Typewriting" (1986) A teenager discovers that his typing teacher is a homicidal maniac. That's pretty much it. Almost got me suspended when I submitted it to a high school short story contest without bothering to change the names. How daring.

"It Takes You Back" (1986?) A man wakes up one morning to discover that hearing any particular song takes him back in time to the first time he heard it. Probably my favorite, idea-wise, of all the stories from that time, because it feels true. Never published, the original manuscript is lost, and I've tried a couple times to write it again from memory without much success.

"Feeding Habits" (1986) Facing starvation, a group of survivors in a lifeboat stay alive by cutting off pieces of a leprous nun (!) and using her flesh as fish bait. I know. If I didn't still have the typewritten original, I don't think I could believe I ever put this on paper. But I did. Oh, I did. Maybe I'll even post it here and we can all marvel at how little I've actually evolved over the years.

I submitted several of these stories and never got them published, but in my senior year of high school I wrote a new story that I thought was pretty good. It was about an avid racing enthusiast with an extreme collection of automotive memorabilia including parts of wrecked cars and, ultimately, amputated pieces of the drivers themselves, lost in various famous crashes. It was eventually accepted in a magazined called Thin Ice, but I believe the magazine ceased publication before my story was supposed to appear. Like the others, it exists now only in memory.

Isn't it Romantic?

Just found out that Eat the Dark is a Top Pick in the October issue of Romantic Times magazine. Reviewer Sheri Melnick writes:

Schreiber's latest novel packs a powerful punch as an alien force takes on sinister paranormal tones in this terrifying drama. In the tradition of Stephen King, Schreiber takes a seemingly innocuous plot premise and turns it into a psychological thrill ride of immense proportions.

Wow! I couldn't be more thrilled. Thanks, Sheri! (She's also the one who interviewed me for January's Harrisburg magazine -- something else to look forward to.)

In other good news, even though it's not due out for another couple weeks, I got my first couple copies of the Chasing the Dead mass market paperback via FedEx. They look great -- and they've even got the first chapter of Eat the Dark included at the end. They're headed for the shelves of supermarkets and Wal Marts on September 25th. Get psyched!

Join the Space Marines!

Ballistics Report

I don't know about you, but when I go to a pig roast, I expect to see about eighty pounds of blackened pork carcass, preferably the eyeballs still staring accusatorily out at me, a long table full of various mayo-based salads, and a BBQ chef with a T-shirt reading: "Everything goes better with a good butt rub." And that's what I got yesterday when a friend invited us out to her parents' farm for an all-day hoo-ha that probably stretched long into the night. I didn't last quite that long, but I did eat a bunch of pig, suck down some country air and bounce around inside an enormous inflatable moon bounce with complete disregard to the fact that I knew almost none of the people there.

Around five-thirty, a friend invited me out to the corn fields a safe distance beyond the farm, where some of the other partygoers, young guys and blonde girls whose names I didn't know were taking turns blasting away at perfectly innocent squash and zucchini with a $1400 tripod-mounted AR-15 assault rifle, which is basically your legal, semi-auto equivalent of the M-16.

To me, the most fascinating thing about the AR-15 was the fact that there's virtually no kick to it. It's got a spring in the stock that absorbs all the recoil, which is kind of amazing considering you're firing a weapon with accuracy up to about 800 yards -- that's the kind of distance Marky Mark was potting counterinsurgents at in the not-exactly-great movie Shooter. Of course I wasn't shooting vegetables from nearly that distance, but the sheer power of the thing, and the ear-ringing thunderclap of firing it, somehow makes it seem like it should be knocking you backward into the corn field.

When I asked off-handedly -- because I am quite the off-handed fellow with a hot assault rifle in my hand -- how difficult it might be to shave the firing pin and convert the AR-15 to full auto, I got a disbelieving look. Sure, it could be done, but it was illegal as hell and would basically destroy any accuracy the weapon might have had. With the pin fixed, you pull the trigger and empty the clip into whatever you were pointing at -- it's basically the equivalent of destroying a precision instrument.

After trying to vaporize a few vegetables, I opted out of shooting the .22 pistol that was also making its way around the group. I was full of pig, and I'd had my share of cordite and smoke.

Plus, I wanted one more chance on that moon bounce.

Lights Out

You all know how I feel about Renee Raudman, the wonderful actress and acclaimed audiobook reader who did Tantor's award winning Chasing the Dead audiobook. What you may not know is that Renee has also signed on to perform the audiobook for Eat the Dark. And what you almost certainly don't know -- because I've never mentioned it -- is that Renee records in a studio in her home, and that she lives in a tiny little California town and her nearest neighbors are a mile away.

In other words, the perfect place to be alone, recording a horror novel.

Late Sunday night, I received an email from Renee. The topic of which was simply: "YOU!!!" And because I'm not used to receiving emails whose topic is in all-caps, let alone with multiple exclamation points, I opened this one with, shall with say, a degree of apprehension. This is what it said.


You are in SOOOO much trouble!

OK...so it's almost 8pm here. Dark outside. I'm sitting in my little recording booth recording EAT THE DARK. I don't keep any lights on IN the recording area because it's easier to read the screen and the text on it with no overhead light. But they are on in the other parts of the house. Which also adds to the ambience on this particular novel.

So, I'm sitting here recording your novel. I'm getting into it SO much I'm even scaring myself a little bit. And I'm at the part where Mike notices dried bloodied footsteps on the floor. And he's trying to figure out how that explosion could have occurred, etc. in chapter 16. And I'm seriously on the edge of my chair saying Mike's thoughts, and I am reading:

SOMEONE WAS WATCHING HIM.
HE STOPPED, JERKED HIS HEAD AROUND AND LOOKED BACK UP THE LONG VACANT HALL. ON EITHER SIDE THE DOORS OF THE ER ROOMS GAPED STUPIDLY OPEN. OVERHEAD, ONE OF THE LIGHT TUBES FLICKERED AND WENT OUT-

And Joe, the SPLIT SECOND I finish recording that line.....
ALL MY ELECTRICITY GOES OUT HERE!!!! EVERYTHING WENT BLACK!
AND I SCREAM!

NOW...talk about GOOSEBUMPS!

It's SO hot here in So CAL that I'm sure that the power outage was due to our power alerts. But I can't tell you how FREAKY the timing was on this one. And how I couldn't believe I was sitting in the pitch dark, scared out of my breeches!

Hmm...

Of course, being the sort of fellow who loves to scare people out of their breeches, I emailed Renee right back to let her know that my novels have a long history of coming true, given the right circumstances.

Later, after some thought, I emailed her again to let her know that I've already started bugging Tantor to make sure she records my next novel.

It's about this audiobook reader...