Overlook Connection Bookstore & Press

   MARCH IS  BRIAN KEENE  MONTH
              AT THE OVERLOOK CONNECTION !

~ FIVE  QUESTIONS  WITH  BRIAN KEENE ~

Welcome to The Overlook Connection's FIVE QUESTIONS! Our readers are always interested in finding out more about the author's we carry here at the Overlook. And we're honored to bring you a happening writer who is a multi-nominated and more importantly. winner(!) of the prestigious Bram Stoker award from the Horror Writers of America.  Brian Keene has been selected to open up and show our readers just how he makes the page "bleed" as a writer in the horror field.

DAVE:   Brian, to bring our readers up-to-speed: you've had over twenty-five novels, short-story collections,non-fiction collections, and edited anthologies published in the last decade. That is an incredible amount of output that amounts to 2-3 books per year! What drives you as a writer? And can we assume your nocturnal in nature based on your writing (maybe you don't sleep based on this amazing output? LOL)

BRIAN:  There’s no big secret, really. I’m driven to write because it’s what I enjoy doing. And I’m lucky enough to earn a living from my writing, which means I get to write full-time. That gives me the luxury of writing for eight or nine hours every day. That’s how I stay so prolific—working eight hours a day, just like I’d be doing if I was still in a factory somewhere.

I write better at night, and prefer to work at night, but that schedule doesn’t necessarily jibe with my family, so I’ve trained myself to write from 7am until around 5 or 6pm. If I’m under deadline, or just really passionate about a story and anxious to work on it, I’ll take a night or two and work straight through. It’s a balancing act, I guess.

DAVE:    You've already got a dedicated readership. Some of your limited edition titles go out of print quickly, and some even garner high prices in the collector's market. This is quite a feat and one to be proud of. What do you attribute this kind of success to? Hard work? Marketing? Blood sacrifice?

BRIAN:  All three (laughs). I don’t know. I’m just lucky enough to have a lot of people who seem to enjoy my stories, and I’m very grateful for that. I don’t try to examine why they like them—I’m just happy they do. I guess maybe it’s because I was a fan of the genre long before I became a professional in it, and I know what—as a fan—I’d like to read, and thus, I can deliver that.

Hell, I’m still a fan, as far as I’m concerned. I still get excited over a new King, Ketchum, Lee, or Hodge novel, and I still babble like a doofus when I meet an author I’ve looked up to or read for years.

DAVE:     Your novel THE RISING won the Bram Stoker Award. You've been nominated several times, and even won previously as an editor for "Jobs In Hell." Did the Bram Stoker for THE RISING (and/or JOBS INHELL) make a difference inyour writing and publishing experience? Do you feel like this was a vindication that kept driving you to write more?

BRIAN:  I don’t think it had much of an impact either way. I am, of course, honored to have won. It’s certainly a nice feeling when your peers recognize you in such a way. But at the end of the day, what does an award—any award—really do besides sit on the bookshelf? No award is going to finish the next book for you. Your average reader doesn’t care about awards—they care about story.

For me, the vindication has always come from the readers. It’s the guy in Iraq who emails me to say that THE CONQUEROR WORMS kept his mind off being in a war or the kid who sends me a message on MySpace to say that they read TERMINAL while in detention (which is where I did most of my reading at that age) or the housewife who gets an hour to herself and spends it with DARK HOLLOW and takes the time to share her thoughts on the book with me. That’s what I care about.

DAVE:   Okay, now the side of Brian Keene that we'd like you to shed some (dark?) light on: The "Hail Saten" series of non-fiction columns. There are now three volumes collected and in print and apparently you've been writing these for years. So, let us inon thee "Hail Saten" and don't hold back now.

BRIAN:  Well, the name started as a joke. Some irate person—the type who rants at the internet—compared me to Satan, but misspelled it with an ‘e’. I thought that was funny and the title has stuck ever since. The Blog itself is a collection of satire and opinion regarding writing, the horror genre, fandom, pop culture, politics, or whatever else is on my mind. Sometimes it’s serious. Most times it’s not. It’s just a way of keeping in touch with my readership.

Three volumes of essays from the Blog have been collected in book form, by Delirium Books, in both hardcover and trade paperback. Sales-wise, they aren’t nearly as popular as my fiction, and stylistically, they’re very different from my prose, but they definitely have an audience.  

DAVE:   Your new novel, DARK HOLLOW, has just been released. And you have GHOST WALK coming in August of this year. What else can we expect from the Keene canon?

BRIAN:  Well, in-between those two, Cemetery Dance will release a new dark crime novel, KILL WHITEY, in trade hardcover and limited edition hardcover. This summer will see Delirium’s trade paperback release of CLICKERS II: THE NEXT WAVE, which I co-wrote with J. F. Gonzalez. And I’m working on a bunch of other stuff---a few short stories and novellas, two more horror novels, a western novel, and some comics. Like I said, there’s enough to keep me busy eight hours a day.

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