THE HORROR FICTION REVIEW

JOHN EVERSON

 John Everson's one busy man: Over the past 15 years, his fiction has appeared in over 50 magazines, and among his novels, his 2004 COVENANT took the Bram Stoker Award for best first novel.  COVENANT has just been released as an affordable mass market paperback by Leisure Books . . . now it's time for the masses to see what they've been missing in the small press.  We sat down (okay, emailed) John recently to pick his brain...

HORROR FICTION REVIEW: Congrats on not only receiving the Stoker for COVENANT, but also for its recent mass market release. How did the story come about?

JOHN EVERSON: Back in the mid-90's, when I was just starting to get a lot of short fiction published, my day-job editor gave me a news clipping about a bar perched on the edge of this gloomy cliff somewhere in Great Britain. The hook was, people would stop at the bar, have a last drink, and commit suicide. It was like, the most popular suicide spot in that country. I filed that little "news of the weird" clip away in the back of my head, but never forgot it... probably a year went by before I started writing COVENANT -- originally titled The Cliff -- and that idea of suicides from a spooky cliff at night gave me the "jump off" point for the novel.  I finished a first draft around 2000, and then gave it a massive rewrite three years later when I sold it to Delirium Books. A few months after its release it won the Stoker Award, and then a couple years later, Leisure picked it up for mass market release. So for a relatively short, fast read of a novel, the book has sort of taken a long, scenic gestative road!

HFR: On top of your own writing, you run DARK ARTS BOOKS. Do you find being an editor as crazy a job as being an author?

JE: Actually, with Dark Arts Books, I'm rarely wearing the hat of "the editor". The press started out when my friend Bill Breedlove, another Chicago author, suggested that we pull together a "Chicago Horror Writers" sampler book for the World Horror Convention in 2006. The idea was just to have a promo piece at the con to spotlight our work, so we tossed in a couple reprints with new material. He served as editor, and I served as designer and publisher... that "quick con chatchki" quickly evolved into a full-fledged press, and Bill is now my co-publisher. He usually serves as editor while I handle book design and distribution (SINS OF THE SIRENS is the only book of the four we've issued that I edited). That said, it can get a little overwhelming at times when you're trying to work on new fiction AND promote a small press while balancing family life and a dayjob! There are absolutely not enough hours in the day to do all the things I'd like to do.

HFR: Does music inspire what you write?

JE:It certainly helps put me in the right frame of mind. I'm also an occasional musician, and for 20 years served as a newspaper pop music critic (in fact, I also wrote some "dark music" columns for genre pubs like Wetbones and Talebones over the years). So music is a huge part of my life -- I don't do much of anything without having music playing. I tend to hole up in a bar booth each week for my "writing night" -- so the type of music they play, as well as the ambience of the place, both are really important things I look for when I choose where to set up my laptop. Those, and what beer's on tap :-) When I write at home, I often set up camp in the basement, turn down all the lights, light a couple candles and turn on CDs like This Mortal Coil, Cocteau Twins, Conjure One, Delerium... moody dream pop kind of stuff. I also listen a lot to auralgasms.com, which matches my musical taste like no other radio station I've ever heard.

HFR: What films do you consider to be scary?

JE: I will always list ALIEN as one of the scariest films -- a perfect merger of sci-fi and horror. More recently, I thought a couple of the SAW films really grabbed the adrenaline pump pretty well. But I think the scariest thing I've seen over the past few years probably was HIGH TENSION. I found the ending a let-down, but about ten minutes before the end, I remember suddenly realizing that my hands were clenched on the couch cushions... and had been for about the last hour!

HFR: Your cover design for your book FAILURE was very intense. Is art something you were into before writing or did you try your hand at it after?

JE: I guess they've grown up in tandem. I kind of bounce creatively between songwriting, fiction writing, photography and graphic design. I've always written -- from poetry to song lyrics to short stories to reviews and news journalism. But a couple years after I got out of college, I was learning a lot of desktop publishing for my work. At the time I thought -- hey, I should put these new "skills" to use for myself -- to pull together some of those old stories and poems I wrote in high school and college and print them together in a nicely designed booklet. Just something to have for me, and maybe a couple of my friends -- kind of a fancy scrapbook of my writing past. In the process of doing that, I designed my first book cover using some arty b/w photography I did in college. The process of putting the book together made me rediscover why I wrote those stories in the first place. I hadn't written fiction at that point in a couple years, but as I put that first collection together, I started writing again. And for the first time, I began submitting fiction for publication. I went on to create a handful of those little booklets in the '90s, all with custom covers based on my photography... once I stopped doing those, I began working with Twilight Tales to design their books and did a handful of covers for them based on my photography, each with an increasing depth of "layered" photo collaging. By the time I did the FAILURE cover for Delirium, I'd really started to develop a certain style of cover design, I think. But that definitely remains one of the "deepest" covers I've done. I really wanted it to evoke the atmosphere of the erotic chaos in the final scenes of the book.

HFR: What advice would you give to new or struggling writers?

JE: Write! And establish some kind of discipline about writing. I've never been great at the latter -- a lot of writers set aside an hour every day to write. I tend to set aside 3-4 hours at one time, but only once every week or two, unless I'm deeply into a project. You learn the craft a lot faster if you work at it consistently. Everyone finds their own path, but I found it very useful to write short stories for quite a long while before trying to make the jump to writing a novel.

But also - Read! Read the guidelines for places you want to submit stories to, and follow them! Read the content of the publications you're submitting to, so you know if you're work is remotely a fit. Read so that you know if your latest story is a brilliant new twist, or if it's been done a thousand times already. I've read the slush pile for magazines and anthologies over the last 10 years, and one thing I can tell you is, there are a lot of writers who ignore all of those "reading" assignments and submit stories in a way that goes against guidelines, has nothing to do with the mission of the publication and is, in fact, just another tired retread of an idea that's been written to death by hundreds of others. Those are usually the writers who get all affronted and angry when they're rejected.

One other great tip for writers is to read your material out loud. It sounds a little hokey to stand in your bedroom or office and read to yourself, but if you do it, and listen critically, you'll hear what sentences are clunky or what dialogue sounds totally unnatural in a way that you won't by just staring at the words on a screen or on paper. I've done a lot of performance reading at the Twilight Tales reading series in Chicago over the past decade, and getting up there and reading to an audience helps hone stories too -- you can hear what the audience responds to, and more importantly, what they don't.

HFR: If you could collaborate on a novel or novella with another author (living or dead), who would it be and why?

JE: Oddly enough, I'm doing it right now. Gary Braunbeck is someone who I have admired as one of the best short fiction writers in the genre for years... and we're currently working on a 3-way story with JF Gonzalez for Doorways magazine. I'd also love to work with Edward Lee or Neil Gaiman. They're wildly different writers, but I can't read either of their work without being sucked in completely from start to finish. That's a skill I'd love to learn... I'm not even sure if it can be learned, or if it's simply part of being born with a natural storyteller's voice. But Braunbeck, Lee and Gaiman are three of the best storytellers in the business in my book.

HFR: With COVENANT now at bookstores everywhere, what can John Everson fans expect in the foreseeable future?

JE: Well, the next thing out will probably be the Doorways story I mentioned. I've also got longish short stories coming out this fall in the anthologies The Horror Library Vol. 3 ("Fish Bait") and Deadly Beauty, Fearful Symmetry ("In Memoryum"). The sequel to COVENANT -- SACRIFICE -- will be out from Leisure in May 2009. And I've just finished the first draft of a new unrelated book called THE 13TH. So it's looking to be a busy year for me! I just launched a revamp of my website and retooled my monthly e-newsletter, so I'll be posting news and some free stories there for anyone who wants to check it out -- just signup at www.johneverson.com/list.htm. I'll be visiting a bunch of cities in September-October (Chicago, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Nashville, Cincinnati, etc.) to do bookstore signings, so I hope some Horror Fiction Review readers in those areas can drop by and say hello!

COVENANT's small press cover (above) and the updated paperback (below)

Our thanks to John for his time and insights!