04 Mar 2010
12:14 pm

by Jeffrey Thomas
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Interview with Horror Writer JOHN EVERSON
JOHN EVERSON is the author of such novels as COVENANT, SACRIFICE, and most recently THE 13TH (all from Leisure Books), and such collections as NEEDLES & SINS, VIGILANTES OF LOVE, and CAGE OF BONES. He is also co-founder of the indie press publishing imprint Dark Art Books. I asked the versatile and excessively talented Everson about these and other of his ventures, via email:
 
JET: John, you’re a writer of novels and short stories, an editor of anthologies, a publisher, a graphic artist, a musician — a regular Renaissance man! What is it in your make up that calls for so many creative modes of expression — is it like a restlessness? Which activity do you love most, and why?
 
I just… like to make stuff! I’m restless, I always have to be “building” something that has some kind of creative element to it, whether it’s a flower bed in the backyard or a short story or a song or website or whatever.  When we were first married, my wife used to want me to sit in the living room after dinner and watch TV with her, and I literally used to sit there during her sitcoms and shift and fidget, thinking about all the more useful things I could be doing! Eventually I would escape and sit down at my synthesizer and write songs. I don’t ever watch television anymore :-)   I do love movies though — I try to make time at least one late night every weekend to kick back and watch a trashy horror flick.
 
 
JET: What was it that moved you to get into publishing, with the creation of Dark Arts Books? Whose idea was it initially, you or cofounder Bill Breedlove?
 
I kind of backed into it all… I was a journalism major and so in my first jobs out of college I found myself doing both reporting and desktop publishing work for newspapers and magazines. Eight or nine years ago, Twilight Tales – a live fiction reading group in Chicago — was issuing an anthology with a trilogy of my stories included, and the “preview” edition of the book did not really have the best treatment of the cover art and text. Since layout was part of what I did for a living, I offered to help tweak the cover a bit for them, and the next thing I knew, I was their book designer for the next four years! That’s where I did my first book cover image collages, as well as internal book layouts.
 
For awhile I was doing all the book creation, distribution and sales for Twilight Tales, but I didn’t have much artistic control over what was being published. Ultimately, I stepped down from the position, and my friend Bill Breedlove suggested since I enjoyed designing books so much, that perhaps I should create a little giveaway style chapbook of our work and the work of two other Chicago writers to take to the 2006 World Horror Con that spring. He picked the stories, and I dug in and started playing with a book layout… and since the idea for eventually doing a small press had been back-of-mind for awhile, I decided I’d create my own little press to release it… and then I bought ISBN numbers and designed a logo… and a web site… and… well, it wasn’t just a story sample chapbook anymore! That book was Candy in the Dumpster, and we had fun doing it, so we decided to do another one for the next World Horror Convention called Waiting For October. My only coda was that this time, I wanted to approach Jeffrey Thomas about appearing in it (you think I’m joking, but I’m not!). I always loved your work, and while Bill has had editorial control over the bulk of our subsequent releases as I exercise full graphic control, there’s always one author in each book that I’ve particularly pushed to include. After Waiting for October, we decided that our collaboration on these projects was really working, and so Bill became my co-publisher in the press. Ironically, our first release after that was the one book that I’ve served as editor on so far — Sins of the Sirens.
 
JET: So how did you initially get into graphic design, and what have been some of your other projects?
 
My initial graphic design work was for the Illinois Entertainer magazine, a Chicago-area music magazine. That was my second dayjob out of college, and while I was working there, on the side, I also put together my very first chapbooks in the early ’90s — a couple of short story samplers of my work for family and friends. Those chaps actually featured my first “graphic covers” and a couple years later, I dabbled in graphic collages to build my first couple of websites. Because of the work I did on my own site, in the early 2000s, I helped redesign the Delirium Books website, and then did a site for Brian Keene as well… and right around that time is when the Twilight Tales thing fell in my lap and suddenly I was designing books.
 
So it was kind of a series of dabblings that led me to design. I certainly never thought when I was training to be a reporter that a dozen years later I’d end up screwing around in Photoshop to make esoteric collages for dark fiction websites and bookcovers! But it’s been a lot of fun. And I’ve gotten to do a half dozen covers for Delirium Books (all of their hardcover chapbooks) and the cover for  Restore from Backup by JF Gonzalez and Mike Oliveri for Bad Moon Books, in addition to the (now) six Dark Arts Books titles. You can see most of the website banners and book covers I’ve created on the “Art” tab of my website – www.johneverson.com/artwork.htm
 
JET: As an artist, how much input do you like to have — and how much are you allowed — with publishers like Leisure Books?
 
Leisure, like most publishers, has its own marketing / art department, and their own stable of artists who create the “look” for their line. My editor, Don D’Auria, always solicits my ideas for each book before meeting with the art director to discuss what they’ll actually do, so I do have the chance to have input. I actually dummied out a couple of ideas for The 13th and Siren in Photoshop and sent them to him, and some of what I suggested came through in the final Leisure artwork. My personal cover art style though isn’t really compatible with mass market paperbacks… those generally have a single focused image front and center on the book… my own style is more to create a mood with a kaleidoscope of merged imagery. So I really trust Leisure to choose the best imagery for my novels.  I know they’ll do a better job for that market space than I ever could hope to!
 
JET: You’re having quite a nice run with Leisure Books, with another novel — Siren — due in the near future. How did you come to their attention?
 
Ruthless repetition? Polite persistence?  I first met Don at the World Horror Convention in Denver in 2000. My first short story collection, Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions for Delirium Books, wasn’t even out yet, but I had the early manuscript for Covenant in hand at that convention, and I “pitched” him on it. He had me send him a copy, and a couple years later, I got a rejection notice on it. In the meantime, I also got rejections from virtually every other major publisher out there… never being one to say die, I rewrote a substantial amount of the novel, expanded it by 10,000 words in the process, retitled it, and sent it out to many places again. When I still got no bites from the mass market crowd, I sent it to Delirium. Shane Ryan Staley, the publisher, had been very supportive of my work and he loved the novel and released it in 2004. Then he issued a novelette, Failure, in 2006 (ironically, he’s just reissued both titles this month as e-books and the e-book version of Cage of Bones is currently topping the Horror Mall’s bestseller list this week!).  In the meantime, at every World Horror Convention from 2000 – 2007, I scheduled myself to pitch novel ideas to Don, who almost always attends that convention to scout for writers. Finally, at WHC in 2007, shortly after Sacrifice had come out from Delirium in hardcover, Don offered me a two-book deal for those first novels.
 
JET: You won the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel for Covenant, published by Delirium Books and later republished by Leisure. Do you find that having such an award under your belt has helped your career greatly? Did you attend the ceremony, and where do you keep your award (in case I need to “borrow” it; it may be the closest I ever come to one!).
 
The Stoker award definitely helped get my work noticed more. I’m sure it helped me get a couple anthology invitations, and it was because of the award that I had both Covenant and Sacrifice translated and published in Poland. And I’m sure it didn’t hurt me when I pitched Leisure. That said, I got the award in 2005… and over the following two years I again pitched Covenant to multiple agents and publishers hoping that the award would give the book enough credence to move into a mass market printing… So I can say that it certainly didn’t make the book a “slam dunk” for New York! It was almost two years after the award that I landed the mass market deal with Leisure.
 
I did attend the Stoker ceremony, which was amazing – Clive Barker, Chuck Palahniuk and David Morrell were all in attendance that year, and I really flew out there only to network. Nobody was more surprised than me when the book won, because it had the smallest distribution and the highest price tag of the books in my category… so I figured it was beyond a ”Dark Horse”. The video of my impromptu acceptance speech is actually online here: http://www.johneverson.com/stokervid.htm
 
 
My Stoker sits on my file case near my desk, alongside my leather copies of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, a real human skull that a friend of mine found in the back of a junked auto, Stoker the Spider (a gift from Charlee Jacob after I won the award) and an old antique shortwave radio that I got from a friend in high school. If you should borrow it in the middle of the night, be warned – there is a large, loud cockatoo named Kiwi caged just to the right of it. She is easily befriended and silenced with bribes of spaghetti, cheeseburger and nachos. Be sure to offer food before fingers.
 
JET: A skull…in the back of a junked car. Ahh, OK. Sounds like the real human skull my brother Scott has, which he “found” as a kid in a crumbling tomb in the old cemetery down the street from where we lived. And Stoker the Spider looks like the giant scorpion I just picked up for Scott while on vacation in Vietnam (yes, and it cost me a whopping 83,000 Vietnam dong!):
 
 
 
Anyway, John, who are some of your favorite authors, and please don’t include me because we know that’s a given.
 
I’ll limit this to “currently actively working” since otherwise the list would be too difficult to carve! My favorite authors actively publishing today are Edward Lee, Neil Gaiman, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Anne Rice, Clive Barker, Stephen King, Michael Marshall Smith, Gary Braunbeck and  Jeffrey Thomas. I’m sorry, but you ARE a given.
 
JET: What’s Siren going to be about? (And by the way, the cover for this upcoming novel is fantastic. Talk about a hypnotic siren.)


 

Siren is about my biggest fear as a father — losing a child. More than that, it’s about losing your center… the lead character of Siren has lost his son to a drowning accident when he himself is an aquaphobe; due to the paralysis of his fear, he couldn’t save his boy and he’s haunted by that. He’s lived a kind of “living death” ever since. He and his wife are growing farther apart as they exist in their own isolated hells. But when he is entranced by the song of a beautiful nude woman on the beach he walks every night… his world begins to shift. And soon he puts everything he holds dear in the balance as he walks the tightrope between lust and love… and discovers where the true depth of his fear lies. It is going to be out in a limited hardcover edition from Bad Moon Books this spring and from Leisure in paperback this summer.

 JET: Are you a writer who incorporates elements of his own life and experiences into his work, and if so, in what way have you done so? Or do you prefer to keep fact and fiction firmly distinct?
 
I’m not sure it’s possible to keep fact and fiction “firmly” distinct. How can a writer create new worlds and people without drawing on his or her own life experience in SOME way? I don’t write specifically ABOUT people, but I certainly grab snippets of character or dialogue, or odd events that I hear about, and spin those into whatever tapestry of words I’m weaving at the time. My eyes see things, dump them in the well, and sooner or later, it all gets recycled somehow, you know? It’s no shock that Joe Kieran, the lead character of Covenant and Sacrifice, takes some of his likes and dislikes and career history (reporter) from my own background. And one of the events of Alex’s life in Sacrifice is drawn from an event in my childhood (the killing of a mouse). And likewise, Evan, the lead character of Siren is reflective of my fear over losing a child, now that I’m a father.  I can’t say that I’ve ever personally had any experience with demonic possessions or sacrificial rituals though!
 
JET: You’re lucky there, cuz it’s no fun, believe me. Anyway, John, what other projects do you have forthcoming, as author and publisher?
  
I just sent the sixth Dark Arts Books anthology to press  a week or so ago – When The Night Comes Down featuring Joseph D’Lacey, Bev Vincent, Robert E. Weinberg and Nate Kenyon. That will debut at World Horror Con in Brighton, England at the end of the month. I’ve also  just turned in a three-story bug-based collection called Creeptych which will be out soon via The Horror Mall. Over the past month, I’ve gone head-first into the e-book world, as The Horror Mall has reissued Cage of Bones and Failure in e-form, and Necro has issued Needles & Sins via Amazon for the Kindle. Lovecraft Press will be completing my e-catalogue this spring with an e-version of my second short story collection, Vigilantes of Love (which originally appeared from Twilight Tales in 2003).
 
I’m now in the midst of working on my fifth novel for Leisure, titled The Pumpkin Man, and hope to be turning that book in this summer, just before Siren is released. And then… it’s off to the beach for me! (Though, if any naked women start singing at me, I hope I’ll have the good sense to run away).
 
JET: Just send those naked women my way, John, especially if they look like your book’s cover model. And thanks for your answers!
 
Visit John Everson’s official web site HERE:
 
And check out the very creepy video trailer for his most recent novel, THE 13TH, at YouTube:
 

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