John Everson: Making a Covenant with Illinois’ Dark Lord of the Arts. By Brian Kirst
Talented horror author John Everson is currently shouting about the ‘dark arts’ from the highest cliffs with his Bram Stoker Award winning splash Covenant (Leisure Fiction). A twisted, nerve rattling excursion into the wicked wiles of a controlling demon and the handful of small town lives he corrupts and destroys, Covenant is truly deserving of all it’s recent exposure and praise. The prolific Everson (reachable at www.johneverson.com), whose work bristles with enthusiasm and precise skill, recently took some time to answer some questions, illuminating lucky Horror Society readers with his influences and future plans.
Brian: Who were your first influences as a writer – The wacky antics of the Archie comics – The drizzling, dark visions of E A Poe – Judith Krantz?
John: In grade school, I bought a classic hardcover edition (you know the kind – with gold foil titling and a ribbon in the middle) of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories at a garage sale; I loved that book – still own it! But mainly, I grew up a sci-fi kid, so actually Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson, Robert Heinlein, Clifford Simak, Eric Frank Russell… those were the authors I read obsessively as a kid. It was the “sense of wonder” in their books that excited me as a reader, and made me want to create fiction of my own to give the same feeling to others. But it was the dark twists of stories from short story writers like Roald Dahl, and science fiction / horror genre straddler Richard Matheson (who also wrote for “The Twilight Zone”) that really influenced my fiction when I began writing. So… monsters and mayhem and make believe… that’s the stuff that influenced me. Anything that had an element of the fantastic – I love the escapism of stories that really could never happen in our reality, whether it had to deal with space ships or demons. Stories with “deep meaning” about the human soul or the way our culture is devolving? No interest.
Brian: What films have inspired your writing the most? (Now, you can’t say Debbie Reynolds’ comedies – everyone answers that.)
John: No, actually it was Molly Ringwald’s comedies.
It’s hard to say, really… I mean – the formative stuff that sets your obsessions… you see or read those things when you’re a kid. And then 20 or 30 years later it comes out somehow in your own art. I have a horrible memory, so the exact titles? I don’t know! I couldn’t say specific films. I can say that growing up in the Chicago area, every weekend I watched a show here called “Creature Features” – a hosted program that showed all sorts of black and white classic horror movies. So I imagine I saw all the Universal monster movies at some point on there, as well as lesser known classic horror films. And I was a huge fan of TV programs like “The Twilight Zone,” “The Outer Limits,” “Night Gallery” and “One Step Beyond.” So while I read sci-fi, I watched creepy shows…. Ultimately, that’s the stuff that stuck, I guess!
Brian: What was the primary inspiration for your creation of the world of Covenant?
John: It actually had to do with a newspaper clipping someone showed me. My boss at work – 15 years ago – said to me one day, “hey, you like writing those creepy stories, check this out.” She gave me a newspaper article about a bar on a cliff in England where people would go to and have their last beer or shot or whatever. Then they’d walk a few yards out the door and jump over the edge. It apparently is the prime suicide spot in the country. A year or more later, that image of people plummeting in the dark from the top of a cliff still haunted me, and that image is the opening of the novel. The reason for the suicides in the novel is naturally, a bit different than chronic depression, however.
Brian: Was it difficult for you to write some of the more gender specific violence in Covenant? (IE – the rape sequences etc…)
John: Essentially one of the core points of the novel is the theme of power and control of… not only one’s own destiny, but one’s own body. Angela and her friends, the victims of the cliff, and even, ultimately, Joe, have to deal with the horror of loss of control. Rape is the epitome of that, and the males as well as females in this novel become “puppets” in a sense, losing their control to a force they can’t escape.
What I’ve found interesting is some reviews of the book that have made the rape scenes such a controversial aspect of Covenant. It’s amusing to me that horror novels and movies that have guts flopping on the floor and heads being lopped off don’t get nearly the attention that a rape scene does – it apparently doesn’t matter if people are brutally tortured, murdered, dismembered, mutilated for life…that’s ok. But invade them sexually, and that’s unacceptable to write about? Maybe that is why I’ve used it as a theme in a lot of my stories. Death isn’t that horrible – it’s simply final. Real horror is living with violation – and perhaps sexual violation is the most horrible because its scars are the most invisible, while at the same time being the deepest. And it’s not the sexual piece of it, so much as the ultimate loss of control that is horrible.
So to answer your question… yes – it was hard to write a couple of those scenes. But ultimately, they are at the crux of what the story is… I couldn’t avoid them.
Brian: How much research do you do for each novel or short story? Does it depend on the project?
John: I don’t tend to do a lot of research because I don’t write historical or science-based novels. I don’t base my stories on real events because the joy in writing for me is “making shit up!” So… I’ll occasionally do a quick Google search to check something, but mainly, it’s just stuff coming out of my imagination. I try to avoid working in plots that will require too much fact-checking, because that, to me, is grounding the story too much in reality. And my whole modus operandi for writing is to get away from reality in a believable way.
Brian: Is there a specific spooky feeling or blackened quality that you try to get across with each thing that you write?
John: My short fiction is especially geared to leave the reader with a “feeling” at the end of a piece. Usually my short stories are written with a very specific emotion in mind and have the intent of capturing a “mood,” so that’s very much the focus of the writing. With a longer work however, I find that I’m more focused on developing suspense and energy, as opposed to simply trying to set a mood.
Brian: What are the things that truly haunt you in real life?
John: Loss. From loss of my “stuff” to loss of my friends to loss of control over my own destiny. In essence, to me, horror is about the loss of control. Something that you can’t outrun enters your perfect little world and throws everything into disarray. Maybe I’m just anal retentive?
John: I’m obviously proud of Covenant – I started out as a journalist and short story writer, and never really thought I’d one day write and publish a novel… even when I was writing it, I never thought I’d finish it. So just to have it out there is a point of pride. Of my short fiction, I’m proud of “Pumpkin Head,” an erotic horror piece that has been reprinted multiple times. I’m also really proud of “Letting Go,” a very personal story that takes place in an afterlife that is neither heaven nor hell – that story made the Bram Stoker Award ballot for 2007 after appearing in my third short story collection Needles & Sins.
Brian: Lastly, any words of advice (IE: Don’t drag your bikini wearing friends into a cave where a carnivorous spirit dwells) or any future projects that you’d like to tell us about? And thanks – it’s been simply possessing!
John: Don’t drag your bikini wearing friends into a cave where a carnivorous spirit dwells really just about covers it. Well, that and don’t make a deal with a demon you don’t want to keep!
Sacrifice, the sequel to Covenant, will be out from Leisure in June of 2009. This week I turned in the manuscript for a new unrelated novel called The 13th, which will be out in 2010, I would imagine.
I’ve also got some new short fiction coming out this fall. I co-wrote a Halloween tale for the new issue of Doorways Magazine with Gary Braunbeck and JF Gonzalez. My novelette “In Memoryum” should be out in the next couple weeks in the Dark Hart anthology Fearful Symmetry, Deadly Beauty. And another novelette, “Fish Bait,” which I wrote a couple years ago after a visit to some of my old CyberPsycho’s AOD magazine friends in Denver, has just been released in Cutting Block Press’s Horror Library Vol. 3 anthology.
My own small press, Dark Arts Books (www.darkartsbooks.com) released two anthologies this year — Sins of the Sirens, an erotic horror anthology, and Like A Chinese Tattoo, a combination of literary horror and over-the-top humorously gruesome horror. Those books each feature multiple stories by four authors – a great way to get to know the breadth and depth of some phenomenal short story writers. This winter we’ll be gearing up to put together and release our fifth Dark Arts volume for the World Horror Convention next spring, while at the same time, I’ll be starting work on my fourth novel.
So… lots going on over the next few weeks! Anyone who wants to check in about my projects, read some free fiction or check out some of my horror-related art and music can visit www.johneverson.com where you can also read my blog and signup for my monthly e-newsletter.
www.johneverson.com; www.darkartsbooks.com
