Читать книгу Weird Tales #354 (Special Edgar Allan Poe Issue) - Simon King - Страница 6

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOE SCHREIBER, conducted by Simon Thalmann

Zombies with Blasters?

It’s been an especially good October for horror novelist Joe Schreiber, who released two new novels on the 13th: an original haunted-house tale, No Doors, No Windows, and the first all-out horror novel set in the Star Wars universe, Death Troopers. The latter has generated huge buzz, and the book’s promoters have pulled out all the stops, giving it its own Web site, a tie-in “quest series” to the popular online game Star Wars Galaxies (marking the first time the game has introduced content inspired by a current novel), and an official StarWars.com “Zombie Week” featuring undead-themed Star Wars art. We caught up with Schreiber, 40, by phone to discuss Death Troopers, which follows the plight of the survivors on the Purge, an Imperial prison barge that breaks down in a distant, uninhabited part of space and comes across a seemingly abandoned Star Destroyer.

WT: How does one transition from writing straight horror novels to writing a Star Wars horror novel?

Schreiber: Like a lot of people my age, I grew up watching the original three movies, and I loved them, and I still love them. My editor at Del Rey and Ballantine was also involved in the Star Wars expanded universe books that they do, and there’d been a conversation with the office about how cool it would be to do a Star Wars horror novel, and they asked me if I would be interested in it, and I jumped at the chance . . . I definitely went about it with the idea of writing a book that you wouldn’t necessarily have to be a huge fan of Star Wars to enjoy. I mean, you could read it as sort of a standalone horror or suspense novel; that was sort of my approach when I tackled it.

WT: How was the writing process different using a preexisting world?

Schreiber: It was ironically liberating, actually. They had an idea of when they wanted the book set, but other than that I really had pretty much free reign to do what I wanted to do . . . within the Lucas universe. It made it a lot of fun to do.

WT: Death Troopers is set just before A New Hope. How does the book fit into that continuity? Are there Easter eggs?

Schreiber: There are definitely some familiar elements for people who love those first three movies. And it’s a great sort of chronological sweet spot to have this occur . . . It’s like the last great wild moment before all these iconic characters came together in that first Star Wars movie, so there’s definitely stuff there you’ll recognize.

WT: You’ve said before that you thought the zombie genre, like the vampire genre, was being overdone.

Schreiber: One of the cool things about the zombie genre, I think, is that you can do a lot with it. I mean, obviously zombie [stories] run the gamut, from 28 Days Later to George Romero’s movies, to all kinds of different. Basically any time you’ve got a group of people isolated against a larger marauding force, it sort of seems to fall within that bigger umbrella of the zombie novel. I don’t want to give too much away for those who haven’t read the book yet, but in the sense that you’ve got this apparently abandoned vessel with things living in it that present a great danger to the people who are there, it definitely fits within that bigger template of what we think of as a zombie book. I was careful to never use the phrase ‘zombie’ when I was writing. I feel like if you can pull away from that a little bit it actually makes it a little bit cooler.

WT: It’s interesting in that, watching the early movies especially, the Stormtroopers kind of have a zombie-like quality already; you don’t really see their humanity. Does this book make room for troopers to be more human?

Schreiber: I love that idea, and I never really thought of that consciously, but you’re totally right. I mean, as a kid especially you see Stormtroopers operate in silence and they’re kind of identical. They totally seem like zombies. But at the same time . . . in a lot of ways they’re just infantryman. They sign up to serve the Empire; they’re guys who put on armor and then at the end of the day take it off, so . . . you get to enjoy both the freaky anonymity of the Strormtrooper helmet but also the personalities of the guys who had to put the armor on and fight for the cause.

WT: The Star Wars universe is incredibly popular. Did you feel pressure to make sure you got the minutiae right or you’d be jumped on by rabid fans?

Schreiber: Yeah, definitely. Not in a negative sense, but very much in the sense that I’m dealing with something that’s been pretty clearly diagrammed forward and backward, both by Lucasfilm and by the people who enjoy their work. So when I first said I would take the job, these big boxes of reference materials started showing up on my doorstep from Lucasfilm. I literally had a two-foot stack of reference guides next to my desk that I constantly was going through to make sure that I was not only getting the details right, but really sort of using it to its fullest potential as far as what’s out there, because so much has been done . . . You try to stay away from some of what’s on the bulletin boards, because online when the deal was first announced, for as many people as were excited about it there were some people who were just like, “This is just gonna suck! This is the worst idea ever!” I told my editor about that and he was like, “Yeah, you really just should stay away from that stuff.”

WT: Your novel No Doors, No Windows came out the same day as Death Troopers. Are you any more excited about one versus the other?

Schreiber: It’s a funny thing, because you just wear different hats. I mean, No Doors, No Windows took me several years to get to where it got published. Between edits and rewrites, that book’s been sort of in the pipeline since about 2005—whereas the Star Wars thing, once I got the go-ahead for it, I had a couple of months to put it together. So one is definitely a more intense process of work on it with no other distractions, and the other is sort of like a kid that I’ve watched grow up. So you’re like the parent who says, ‘Oh, I love them both in different ways,’ but that’s basically true. I don’t necessarily feel more strongly about one than the other but I definitely feel differently as far as the process that spawned them.

WT: Given that you worked on No Doors, No Windows so much longer, do you worry that the Star Wars book will overshadow it will all its publicity?

Schreiber: You try to be realistic about it. I mean, honestly, my publisher has a lot more at stake with the Star Wars book, and I recognized that going in. They love both books, and my publicist wants to make sure both books get attention, but the reality is you’re dealing with an audience of lots and lots of fans with the one—and with the other you’re dealing with an audience that hopefully will enjoy it. It’s coming out the same day, and when I tour, both of the books will be out there, and I hope people will pick the other up—you know, just because they’re interested in Star Wars, and also the hope is that there will be some horror fans who may try a Star Wars novel who might not have normally picked it up.

WT: Is No Doors, No Windows a departure from your previous horror novels in any way?

Schreiber: It’s a bit of a departure in that my earlier two horror novels, Chasing the Dead and Eat the Dark, were definitely these full-throttle, right out of the gate, very streamlined horror novels. The idea was to strap you to a rocket in Chapter One and you’d look up at three in the morning and realize you just finished the whole book. And No Doors, No Windows was an attempt to try something maybe a little bit more ambitious, a haunted-house novel with more of a slow burn so that when the real horror of what’s going on finally kicks in, you’ve created this atmosphere of dread that envelopes the reader.

WT: Will you be reading from both on your current book tour?

Schreiber: That’s a really good question. I’m not sure. I guess it depends how many people show up wearing Stormtrooper helmets versus black shirts with skulls on them. I may have to make that decision when I get there. There’s a few points of mutual cross-reference between the two books, so maybe I can find something . . . There’s a scene in No Doors, No Windows where one of the guys is sitting at the bar and looks up and the bartender is reading this Star Wars book with a severed Stormtrooper’s head on it, and he’s like, “When did this whole world become about death?”

WT: You have another Star Wars novel due out next year, as well as one based on the TV show Supernatural. Meanwhile, you moonlight working the midnight shift as an MRI tech near your home. Any plans to quit the “day” job and focus solely on writing?

Schreiber: That’s the question of the century. I talk to other people who’ve done stuff like that, who’ve worked their jobs and then tried to go to just writing, and at this point the best I could probably hope for is to cut the hours back at some point. Between the health insurance my job gives me and the financial security, at this point it probably would be more stressful to try to go full time writing. But I haven’t taken my eye off that, obviously. That’s sort of the Grail . . . you gotta dream big.