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| INTERVIEW w/author GARY BRAVER - By Deek - 8/04 |
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Ok, usually our pretty n' frilly interview introductions are long-winded and spoil what's to come in the actual interview for any of you far too lazy to actually read on a little, but in the present case, I'd like to give you all just a quick note of instruction. Here goes: Please throw out most of the horror-fiction tripe that sits upon your collapsing bookshelf, for you may soon be introduced to the twisted, well-written, addictive, and coffee-laden world of Gary Braver! This guy is a wild read, take my word for it. (OK, I lied, this introduction STILL wound up being lengthy - sonofa..)
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DEEK: Alright, first off, thanks for doing this...I know you’re a busy guy and I know its finals week (Northeastern University in Boston), so god bless ya’ Gary, I appreciate this for our Purerockfury.com horror kickoff.
Gary Braver: My pleasure, my pleasure...
DEEK: In anycase, before we get into the literature, the quick backstory: I had you as a professor about five years back for a horror- fiction class where we covered Clive Barker, Dean Koontz, the works of Stephen King, and the omnipresent faustian bargain. Now fast forward about five years to the present day where as I’m picking through my bookshelves I come across “Rough Beast”, and decide to read it over again, while thinking, “Ya’ know, I’d really like to talk to that sick and twisted s.o.b. Gary Goshgarian at some point.” Anyways, to cut to the chase, I type in your name on the internet, and under “Goshgarian” you’re not so easy to hunt down anymore. Are we allowed to really talk about the name change? Or have I said too much already?
Gary Braver: Oh yes, of course. The name change was not my decision, but the name choice was. The decision was purely marketing, not because we’re going from a long funny name to a shorter one that’s more memorable, but it had to do with the perception of “Elixir,” which the publisher got in management form. I was half way through the book and we got a movie option from Ridley Scott, so it was perceived as having some leverage and possibly some legs. We went to a publisher who loved the book and wanted to do it, and I had been at Penguin before and was looking for a new (publishing) house as well. Ultimately they bought the book, but they said, “We’d like you to change your name.” Bookstore chains run book sales in America, same as the music industry, and the thing is, if authors come out with a subsequent book, the bookstore chains will look at the sales of the previous title from a particular author...
DEEK: Your track record so to speak?
Gary Braver: Exactly. Say with the last Goshgarian book, Barnes And Nobles ordered a thousand copies and they sold five hundred...they’re only going to nationally order five hundred the next time around, which is about one book a store. So for a book that looked like it might be able to take off, and had a potential Ridley Scott movie attached to it, they said “We’re going to have to debut you as a new author”. They wanted something short and at the front of the alphabet and I said “Stephen King!” Unfortunately that one was gone and spoken for though. They told me that they wouldn’t publish me if I didn’t make the change. It made sense though since we had a book that was really OK, and it had a chance of making it to the screen, although it never did and was optioned twice.
DEEK: “Elixir,” you’re talking about?
Gary Braver: Yeah, “Elixir” was optioned twice. Ridley Scott renewed it the next year because he was still interested, but they made “Hannibal” instead, or so I was told. Its been optioned again though, so someone is doing the script right now. So anyway, I asked how long I had (for the name change) and they told me I needed a new moniker in three days. So I went through a bunch of short, in-the-front-of-the-alphabet names, and nothing really stuck, so I started going through the family tree. Armenian names are long and my last name roughly translates into “shoe maker,” so I was O for two off the bat. My grandfather’s name meant “brave” or “braver person” though, so I went with “Braver” which is actually a real name.
DEEK: And it works considering the genre.
Gary Braver: Yeah, and it works because it looks OK on a book (showing me the newly printed paperback version of “Elixir”) and they got behind it and pumped out a lot of copies and advertised widely, so it got the promotion that was necessary to knock it up a few notches beyond what Penguin was doing for me...and it got it into the bookstores, it was everywhere.
DEEK: Now the previous book before “Elixir” was “The Stone Circle”...
Gary Braver: Yes, “The Stone Circle,” very good. That was the last Goshgarian book and “Rough Beast” was the one before that. Last October is when the hardcover edition of “Gray Matter” came out as well.
DEEK: ...And that brings me to the current work at hand “Gray Matter.” Could you give me the backstory on that, I mean, within the book you have several layers present in which you bring forth commentary on the fixation of academic performance, you touch upon the hidden, dormant horrors of LSD, and you prey upon parental fears of child rearing towards the goals of health and success. In your words could you give us the quick rundown for any of our readers?
Gary Braver: It taps into the anxieties that we may not be giving birth to, or raising the perfect child. It taps into middle class, college educated parents who want to have the perfect child by having their teeth fixed, their hair fixed, their boobs fixed, and their IQ fixed, if it is not such. The synopsis is a woman who appears to have everything going for her, her health, her youth, she’s attractive, she’s affluent, and she has a gorgeous six year old child who sings like a bird, but who has learning difficulties. She soon learns that she had taken a drug back in college that had been the mutagenical cause of her son’s brain problems and she’s ripped apart with guilt. She’s torn apart when she sees other kids call him “dummy”. She lives in a community where rewards for intelligence are prevalent- those who are educated have the dough. Later, when she hears of a clandestine, expensive, and controversial procedure that turns little kids into geniouses, she’s tempted. It taps into some problems I had both as a parent, and as an educator, in that there is this abnormal craving to raise a perfect child, which advertisers feed into. Infertile couples are advertising in the Yale Gazette and The Harvard Crimson for eggs from bright young females, you have computer games placed into cribs with games like Baby Einstein to turn your child into a wiz kid, and they play cds in a kids crib hoping he’ll come out bilingual the next day. It’s a mania that’s reducing childhood to curricula. You bounce the kid from playcenter, to violin lessons, to soccer, to math lessons, and it gets crazy when the child’s developmental stage is broken down into little stages where there is no bonding with other kids and learning to be social. Its also an attack, in some respects, on the standard view of what intelligence is, math and verbal. Michael Jordan can defy gravity, he’s a physical genious, and there are people who are musical or artistic geniouses who wouldn’t score above a one-hundred by their IQ, and that is a broader definition of intelligence. That is probably the moral issue addressed in the book.
DEEK: So its more a commentary that one’s worth shouldn’t be determined by standardized testing, which I found particularly interesting since you’re a college professor.
Gary Braver: Yeah, precisely. Every semester I get a kid who has a note saying that they have learning disabilities or special needs and that they need to be put in the front of the class. If they weren’t intelligent, they wouldn’t be here...they were able to do the work, and we’ve gotten more liberal as to what the definition of intelligence is.
DEEK: Now quickly too, a side tangent here….You’ve not only written “Rough Beast”, “Gray Matter”, “Elixir”, and “The Stone Circle”, but you penned “Atlantis Fire” as well, which I have not read yet...
Gary Braver: “Atlantis Fire,” that was the first one. That’s a good one, but its not horror. It’s a diving novel.
DEEK: Regardless still, you have now had five novels under your belt, which is a fairly large undertaking for any one person. Now myself, being a “non-writer,” I was curious as to whether or not you had a strict regimen in terms of your writing approach. Do you have set hours in which you’ll tackle the project at hand, or is it a more off-the-cuff, diner-napkin, method?
Gary Braver: No, I write everyday, and now that I’m approaching a deadline, I’m up at 4:30 every morning. I’ve been writing (today) since I got up this morning (his computer screen is open to his newest work at our side), and after my morning classes, I have a large block of time after classes. I’m writing all the time, on the weekends too, now that my kids at college and gone...
DEEK: Now you can really start churning out the books!
Gary Braver: (laughing) That’s it. I’ve got a three book contract, so I have to deliver now. If you want to get to where you want to be and say that you don’t want to teach anymore, or that you only want to teach one course a year, and have that financially catch up to you so that you can pursue your dream to write...I’m in a good place to do that now. I’m not there yet, but that’s what I want to do when I grow up (laughing). Ultimately I want to have more time for the leisure, in terms of reading books and being able to go on vacations here and there, in addition to doing the writing.
DEEK: Big fan of the coffee?
Gary Braver: Oh yeah. There are sections of rainforest in Ecuador named after me!
DEEK: I’m sure you’d be hard pressed to come up with a pattern or a given time frame for each novel, but how long approximately does it take to pump out each book?
Gary Braver: A year and a half. Some things have gotten in the way (Gary is also the author of 22 text books in Literature), but now I want to deal with the regularity. But yeah, one a year would be optimum.
DEEK: And back on your collection of works...I just read your three most recent books back to back, and a couple passages I picked out made me think, “Man, that Gary is one sick, graffic, and twisted chap!” I enjoy that stuff a lot, and a few scenes border on splatter-punk in their attention to gory detail. In "Gray Matter" you have a scene where a little girl makes quick work of a little kitten by means of a garbage disposal, and in “Rough Beast,” we’re given a prologue where the mutant offspring of a dog dines on its mothers intestines as well. Also in “Elixir” you paint quite the macabre picture of the regressive meltdowns of each drug user, once deprived of their supply...all in all, not a novel to be enjoyed just prior to dinner! So cutting to the chase, I gotta ask, are you “THAT creepy guy” in your neighborhood?
Gary Braver: No, but you can tell I was brought up by the movies and I mainlined all the stuff I could read and went to every awful horror and science fiction movie, and I still do. I don’t see all of them, but I try to rent some of them. I mean, some of the movies are absolutely abominable, but some of the crappy and campy films are just wonderful. Overall though, I was nurtured on that, particularly the movies, so I have kind of a cinematic approach in that I see a scene in my head and write it.
DEEK: I’m much like you, where I’m a little too into horror movies, and just recently I was reading the book “Men, Makeup, and Monsters,” where it shone light upon all the special effects make-up pioneers such as Dick Smith, and a lot of the men behind most of the great horror movies. In one chapter it focused on Tom Savini too, who was behind the effects in such films as “Night Of The Living Dead”, “Friday The 13th”, and “Maniac”. Now what I found more-so interesting was that after awhile when Tom Savini began gaining fame and notoriety for his contributions to the horror world, he became more of a recognizable figure who would receive a lot of flak and disdain from those who couldn’t understand how he could live with himself after deciding to thrive in such filth and violence as a profession. Now, it’s a completely different media, and you’re not quite as sick as Savini is, but do you ever get that sort of response from people?
Gary Braver: Sometimes. My favorite response to that, and I wish I thought of it first, was something that Stephen King said when I had him speak to a class. King said, when asked why he wrote horror-fiction, “What makes you think I have a choice?” I’m not a sick guy, but with horror, you want to “smack on the quick” with the reader. Every reader has a family, or has had a family, and so the things that are household or universal fears always hit most people most effectively. I like taking common household things and making them into the horrific, such as the garbage disposal scene in “Gray Matter.” The thing that also always got me as a kid, which you’ll see in my books, are the Twilight Zone-like unexpected kickers at the end of an episode, and the aberrations they dealt with. Having the little kid in “Elixir,” who is frozen at six years old in body, is something that just gave me chills when I wrote it (Interviewer's note: That particular scene is EASILY one of the more frightening highlights of the book as you may see). I loved that scene. But yeah, I do get people who think I’m a sick man- they buy the books though!
DEEK: I’m not passing judgement, I think its great! Moving on, you’ve dealt with the horrors and fears of aging in your books, the tangible horrors of environmental threats, political corruption, and so forth, but aside from what we’ve experienced in your books, what is it that YOU are actually afraid of that we don’t yet know about. Fear of Lollipops? Mexican mimes? J.K. Rowling-aphobia?
Gary Braver: The thing that would scare me is something that would happen to my kids. I now have growing fears of terrorism too since I travel a lot. You factor in having a heart attack, or dying of cancer someday, but before you never thought, “Gee, I might have a shoe blow up next to me on a plane”. I’m afraid of the human mind, not demons, vampires, or swamp monsters. King said it right in the beginning of “The Tommyknockers” when he wrote, “If you don’t believe in the Ooga-Booga Man, just take a look at CNN and today’s headlines!" The awfulness that we can do to each other is what scares me- running into people that are nuts.
DEEK: And man are there lots of 'em! Hey, also just wanted to commend you on the nice little Clive Barker nod you had in “Rough Beast”.
Gary Braver: That’s right, the kid has a “Nightbreed” poster on the wall.
DEEK: I’m a big fan of Barker’s work, especially “The Damnation Game,” and was hoping, for the sake of those who haven’t really delved into horror-fiction just yet, and who might be looking, at some point, to do so...what five or so novels might you recommend? I know you’re well-versed in the field and you have quite a collection of novels here in your office, so your opinion counts much more so than the harmonica playing bum in front of the liquor store down the street. Do tell...
Gary Braver: (laughing) Yeah, and you should see my home! My wife keeps telling me to bring ‘em (the books) here! I think “The Shining” and “Pet Semetary” are my favorite King books. As far as Dean Koontz goes, “Watchers” was my favorite since it took the science-horror angle, the tampering with forbidden fruit, and Koontz makes sympathetic that creature. “If You Could See Me Now” by Peter Straub, and “Julia,” by Peter Straub, are another two I think are terrific. I’m attracted to writers who can legitimately write, and not just have a good chiller. I’m into the language, descriptions, and the depictions of characters, which is one reason I don’t particularly enjoy John Saul. I should be enamored with Anne Rice, but I can’t get through her. I find it pretentious and overwritten, and ultimately I don’t care about the characters- they’re not interesting enough to me. Pat McCarthy though, a new name, who I haven’t read yet, is apparently very hot right now. I plan on reading him sometime soon.
DEEK: Now what about movies too? I asked this to a lot of people, from Rob Zombie, to Fred Durst, but not to a single author yet. What are among your faves?
Gary Braver: Lets see..."Night Of The Living Dead", "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", the original "Wolfman" and "Dracula"...I thought "The Omen" was terrific too! I enjoyed "Jeepers Creepers" for its startling effects as well. I’ve seen so many I wish I had a list ready for you. I really thought the Klaus Kinski "Nosferatu" remake was terrific as well as "Shadow Of The Vampire" with Willem Dafoe. I wish I had anticipated the question, but definitely Romero’s "Night Of The Living Dead," which was effective for a $100,000.000 film out of Pittsburgh. I was a big fan of "Rosemary’s Baby" too...and of course "The Exorcist."
DEEK: Hey, that’s MUCH more thorough than what I usually get. Now wrapping things up and back on the printed word, so you can finally get home...As a writer, as compared to the Kings, Littles, Cleggs, and Barkers, you’ve been comparatively kept under the radar for the most part...
Gary Braver: (feigning crying)
DEEK: No, I don’t mean it that way. I’ve honestly enjoyed each of your books so far and especially liked “Elixir”. I’m curious as to who else might be in the comparative horror underground from around the Boston area that you might know of. Chuck Hogan, author of “The Blood Artists” from Brookline, Massachusetts is a guy I’ve interviewed in the past...are you familiar with him at all?
Gary Braver: No, actually (as he jots the name down). As for other writers too, I really don’t know (any others). It’s a tough scene overall. I often don’t have a chance, because of my schedule, to keep up with all the new submissions and new names that are out there.
DEEK: Fair Enough. What’s on the old chopping block right now? I hear “Flashback” is your next novel.
Gary Braver: Yeah, “Flashback”. I really write more Science-Horror as opposed to the pure supernatural. “Flashback” is about a alleged cure for Alzheimers disease that works too well and results in old people being stuck in their past and not wanting to come out. The present is an intrusion to them and they are reliving flashbacks of their childhood that can either be horrific or pleasureable to them. Meanwhile there’s a murder-mystery going on with a guy who was exposed to something while very young, which is now coming back to him since he’s been utilizing the drug. The ultimate question is, if you could relive your childhood, would you? What if you had no choice? This fall is the slated, and hopefull, release for that book.
DEEK: And in closing, GaryBraver.com is the site if people want to delve more-so into the world of your madness. Gary, thanks again for taking the time out, I really appreciate it.
Gary Braver: Thank you Deek.
FOR MORE INFO ON Gary Braver, check out: www.GARYBRAVER.com
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