When I was given the opportunity to speak to horror author William Todd Rose about his work, I couldn't resist. His recent novel, published by the fine folks at Permuted Press, has proven to be an excellent entry into the zombie-fiction genre. If you love zombies, horror, or science-fiction---heck, if you love to read a good story, The Seven Habits of Highly Infective People is highly recommended.
Synopsis for The Seven Habits of Highly Infective People:
Bosley
Couglin can travel through time. And the future does not look good.
Through
a heady cocktail of drugs and the occult, Bosley slips through time and space
and glimpses The End. Cities lay in
ruins, and those who still cling to life hide in the rubble like frightened
animals. Walking carcasses shamble through the debris exacting a horrible fate
upon any living they find.
This
horrific future is the only world fourteen year old Ocean has ever known.
Starving and alone, she struggles for even the most basic of necessities: food,
water, shelter, love…
In
the present, Bosley stumbles across Clarice Hudson and soon realizes that she
is much more than a simple shop girl. One by one, she displays the seven
symptoms of the contagion that will bring Bosley's world to an end and create
the nightmare Ocean calls home. Clarice may hold the key to stopping the coming
apocalypse and sparing Ocean from the atrocities of mankind's imminent future…
but only if Coughlin is willing to push beyond every notions he's ever held
about right and wrong.
INTERVIEW:
VB: Your work tends to straddle the line
between horror and science-fiction, often blending both genres seamlessly. Why
did you choose horror? More specifically, what interests you about writing in
the zombie sub-genre?
WTR: I’ve
always had a fascination with horror in general. Ever since I can remember, I was enthralled
with ghost stories and those creepy urban legends we all grew up with. So when I began writing my own stuff, it was
just a natural extension of this interest.
So I guess I didn’t exactly choose dark fiction… it was just kind of
there all along.
The
zombie subgenre fascinates me for a couple different reasons. For quite some time I’ve been intrigued with
the psychological and sociological ramifications of a single, shared event… in
this case, the collapse of civilization as we know it. How individual people would cope with this
collective tragedy would undoubtedly be as varied as the personalities
involved. Of course, I could explore
apocalyptic scenarios in ways other than the walking dead (such as I did in Cry Havoc and Apocalyptic Organ Grinder);
but zombies can be a lot of fun.
There’s the obvious metaphors of facing one’s own mortality and the
whole preternatural aspect of living corpses, but damn it I like monsters! Always have.
And zombies, in my opinion, are the perfect monsters. Werewolves only change by the light of the
full moon; vampires must seek refuge
during daylight: but a zombie isn’t
bound by any of that. A zombie will just
keep coming after you until either you kill it or it kills you. But the best
thing about reanimates is they plunge humanity back down to the bottom of the
food chain. It’s not enough that our
infrastructure lays in ruins. It’s not
enough that PTSD runs amok from the initial shock and awe campaign of an undead
uprising. Zombies completely outnumber the living and put us back to a place we
haven’t been for a very, very long time.
We become prey, plain and simple.
The
Seven Habits of Highly Infective People offers a unique reading experience
because it is often surreal, while showcasing characters whose emotions and
struggles are both contemporary and emotional. Tell us a little about one of
your characters, and how you think their conflicts are relevant to readers.
Ocean
is a young girl, around fourteen years old or so, who has grown up in the
apocalyptic wastelands of the United States.
She’s never known any other world than the one she was born into. Her reality consists of hiding and evasion,
of desperately struggling to survive in an inhospitable environment. When she was very young, the already crippled
remnants of society were further torn apart by Food Wars. In these wars, gangs fought one another, and
massacred innocents, in an attempt to seize as much food and as many weapons as
they could. When it was all over, there were no more supplies to be had,
further pushing mankind toward extinction.
The people of her world aren’t survivors… they’re refugees. In fact, when we first meet Ocean she is
emaciated to the point that most of her hair has fallen out and is trapping
flies in her mouth just for a bit of sustenance. She’s almost more animal than human, sniffing
at the air to detect the scent of nearby zombies, scurrying through warrens and
tunnels of debris.
But
even though she lives in a world so very unlike our own, human nature still
asserts itself. Like all children, she
plays. Kids in our world look at the
clouds and amuse themselves by forming pictures from the shapes they see… Ocean
does the same thing with the Rorschach-like bloodstains that color her
world. Eventually she feels the pangs of
first love, the confusion of adolescence.
In a lot of ways, her portion of The
Seven Habits is a coming of age story set against a very desolate and
horrible backdrop.
Is the protagonist of Seven Habits, Bosely Coughlin, the kind of guy a girl would be
comfortable bringing home to meet Daddy? He seems like the kind of guy who
could easily be misunderstood…
Bosley
definitely isn’t a “meet the parents” type of guy. To begin with, he possesses an almost
encyclopedic knowledge of the occult.
Combing arcane rites with a steady drug regimen, he hopes to totally
erase his own ego so he can rebuild it from the ground up, tailor made to his
specifications. He’s extremely
intelligent with a particular interest in science, but can also be a
condescending ass at times. He’s pretty
much given up on personal hygiene and his circle of acquaintances include drug
dealers and prostitutes. He’s probably
most parents’ worst nightmare. So, as you can see, he’s not exactly your
typical “hero”. But he’s actually a good
person at heart. You just have to get to
know the dude.
Seven
Habits features a very fresh take on the zombie genre. Like most of your
work, this book warps both the metaphysical and physical worlds. How does a
creative mind like yours work? What is your writing environment like? Was there
a specific type of process or mood you relied on while writing this novel?
I’m
not exactly sure how my mind works.
These characters and situations just kind of pop unbidden into my
head. As far as my writing environment,
it’s pretty simplistic. Just a desk,
chair, my computer, a few favorite toys, and lots of scraps of paper with
snippets of prose and dialogue jotted down.
Though I almost always do have music playing as I write. I usually try to match the style of music to
the atmosphere I’m trying to capture.
For The Seven Habits, the
soundtrack to my writing featured predominantly goth and darkwave bands. I was trying to set a tone of brooding melancholy
and menace, so these songs fit pretty well in my opinion. As far as the process goes, The Seven Habits was something of an
anomaly. I generally write in a very
sequential order. Chapter one is
followed by chapter two and the plot unfolds in a linear manner. When writing this book, however, I was kind
of all over the place. Much like Bosley
being pulled back and forth through time and space, I would find myself working
on things that happened near the end of the book and then going back to work on
earlier events before returning, once again, to later plot developments. It was such a different way for me to work
that I was kind of surprised there was actually a consistent story arc. Everything eventually got put in
chronological order (at least as much as possible when time travel is an
element in your tale), but it was a very scattered method of writing that I
don’t know if I could do again if I tried.
Has there ever been a sequence or an event
in one of your novels that you found difficult to write because it was
disturbing, or is there a scene that you consider to be particularly horrifying
now?
There’s
never really been anything which has been difficult to write. This might be because I have a pretty sick
and twisted imagination, as well as sense of humor. Sometimes when I’m working on something
really horrific, I’ll be sitting there cackling like a madman with twisted
glee. The funny thing is it’s not
graphic scenes that eventually get to me.
It’s usually subtle things. The
last sentence in the short story “Cooking with Grace” (from Box of Darkness) is a good example. That sentence gives me chills when I go back
and read it. And that’s the way it
usually is for me. It’s the subtext which
creeps me out.
What do you look for when you sit down to
read a horror story? What was the last good book you've read?
I
like something that’s different. I don’t
want a cookie-cutter knockoff of the current bestseller. I don’t want to read an author who writes the
same book over and over and over. I
don’t want predictable. I haven’t been
reading as much as I used to, but the last good book I read was Neuromancer by William Gibson. Again.
I never get tired of that novel and have actually lost count of how many
times I’ve read it. If I refine your
question to the last good book I’ve read that I hadn’t read before, then the
answer would be Blood Legacy by Carl
Hose.
Finally, what advice can you give to other
writers?
My
advice to writers is short and simple: be true to your own voice. Don’t try to
be Stephen King, Dean Koontz, or HP Lovecraft. Just be yourself.
LINKS:
BIO:
Named
by the Google+ Insider's Guide as one of their top 32 authors to follow,
William Todd Rose writes dark, speculative fiction which often lends itself to
the bizarre and macabre. With short
stories appearing in various magazines and anthologies, his body of work also
includes the novels Cry Havoc, Shut The Fuck Up and Die!, The Dead and Dying,
and The Seven Habits of Highly Infective People, as well as the short story collection
Sex in the Time of Zombies. For more
information on the author, including links to free fiction, please visit him
online at www.williamtoddrose.com
