Origins

“Where did you grow up?”

It’s a common enough question, one I’ve been asked many times in casual conversation. The mundane answer would be, “Paterson, New Jersey.” Yes, Paterson, once a great industrial city, birthplace of Lou Costello, now a decaying, crime-ridden mess. But Paterson is only part of the answer. I was born there, lived there until I was nineteen, so yes, I grew up there, but a man whose best feature is his imagination (and it must be, ‘cause it sure ain’t my looks or personality!), has many homes encountered in many ways. So here’s the rest of the answer, the facts that go beyond the easy answer of Paterson, New Jersey:

I grew up on Baker Street, where the client comes panicked and tells a terrible tale while Watson packs his revolver and the game is suddenly, joyously afoot.

And I grew up in the 23^rd century, on a great ship where the captain is brave and confident, the first officer logical, and the doctor is the real McCoy (not an Urban legend).

And I grew up in a very specific New York City, selling selfies to finance my webs and hiding the wonderful, terrible truth from dear old Aunt May, and I could see the Baxter Building towering over us and I knew that even the streets of Hell’s Kitchen were safe because justice is blind.

And I grew up in Gotham, waiting for a signal that outshines the moon, a call to arms, for the hour to don cloak and cowl and chase down clowns, cats, and others of that superstitious, cowardly lot.

And I grew up in Cimmeria, surviving on sword and wits and wanderlust.

And I grew up in Innsmouth, where the air smells of fish and strangers are most unwelcome.

And I grew up in the Carpathians, where the children of the night make sweet music and the dead travel fast.

And I grew up on Tattooine, and flew off across the stars with an old hermit and a master pilot and his loyal, furry first mate.

And I grew up in the October Country, where a saint named Ray showed me how mood and essence are just as vital as plot.

And I grew up in London and a plethora of other places, where my face often changed while my name and number stayed the same and the gun never left my hand except when my arms were around an exotic beauty, and the world was always better shaken than it was stirred.

And I grew up in Middle Earth and traveled far and wide and back again in the company of wizards, dwarves, and elves.

And I grew up in jungles and battlefields and on pirate ships and in Sherwood Forest and Ancient Egypt and Rome in the days of Caesar, and Camelot and ‘Salem’s Lot.

And I grew up under an opera house where the Phantom silently terrified the world with a simple revelation of what waits beneath his mask.

And I grew up in a strange neighborhood where a family of monsters lived down the street from a witch, a Martian, and a talking horse.

And I grew up in the ‘40s flashing a whip, punching Nazis, and fearing snakes.

 And I regenerated in a blue box that’s bigger on the inside and can take you anywhere and any-when and safely home again or onward farther and deeper than imagination itself.

And I grew up in a hundred other places that etched their echoes into my mind and dreams and ideas and made me who I am today.

Paterson was only an ingredient. 

If Your Children are Dreamers, Let Them Dream

My father has become a big fan of my writing, especially my spy novel, Nobody Dies forFree. My grandparents read my books too. My grandfather loves my pulp work, especially my Allan Quatermain and Sherlock Holmes stories. My grandmother is, like Dad, a fan of my espionage agent character, Richard Monroe.  

 Like any writer, I’m always happy to hear that any reader has enjoyed my work. But I have to admit to feeling a special sense of victorious satisfaction when I hear my older relatives talking positively about the fact that I’ve grown up to be a published (and sometimes paid!) author. This is because there was a time when the same personality traits that enable me to pursue this art form made those same relatives of mine suspect that something might be wrong with me. I know there were times when they worried, when they wished I was what they expected me to be, wanted me to be what they defined as a “normal kid.”

            I don’t hold it against them. It’s the job of parents and grandparents to worry about their offspring. But I do find it ironic now that the eccentricities of my boyhood, the things that made them upset (and no, they never treated me cruelly, but I know they wondered), are the same things that led me to write the words they seem very much to enjoy reading now, several decades later.

            In every generation of children, there are those that shun the usual social activities of their peers, or that would rather sit inside and read no matter how sunny the Saturday afternoon is, or would prefer to sit with Grandpa in his basement workshop and listen to his war stories. These are the kids with powerful imaginations, who spend more mental energy wondering what grand adventures the future might hold than they do worrying about the baseball game in the park or their homework or who’s wearing the most fashionable sneakers.

            I know my parents worried that I had my nose stuck in a comic book when I should have been playing football with the rowdy brothers from down the block. I overheard my grandmother complain to my mother after  she babysat us one day, concerned that I sat in the cellar for hours staring into the little black and white TV we kept as a spare. Little did she know that I was busy discovering—with rapt amazement, I might add—how thrilling it was to witness the havoc unleashed on Tokyo when Godzilla, Mothra, and Rodan rampaged.

             I’m sure Mom and Dad also heard me sneaking around the house at 3 A.M. some mornings, long before an 8-year old should have been up. I’ll let everybody in on the secret of what I was doing, since it’s safe now that 29 years have gone by. The local public TV station used to show old silent movies in the wee hours. I was sneaking out of bed to get my education in things like the fantastic set designs of Metropolis, the ahead-of-their-time dinosaur effects of The Lost World, and what might still be the single greatest shocker in horror movie history: the unmasking of the Phantom of the Opera! 

            Yes, that strange little boy who didn’t want to run around and get dirty every summer afternoon, who wanted instead to spend his time falling merrily into the worlds created by JRR Tolkein, Isaac Asimov, Gene Roddenberry, George Lucas, Ian Fleming, Roger Zelazny, Stan Lee, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and so many other wonderful creators, was doing something much more important than getting skinned knees and hitting doubles past the shortstop’s frustrated reach. He was working, though he didn’t realize it at the time. He was a writer in training, absorbing the wonderful products of the minds of those who came before, the scribes of fantastic worlds who would exert a lifelong influence on him and make him dream and ask the eternally perfect, vitally important question of, “What If?” until one day, years later, the dreams and ideas in his head, the trees of imagination that came from the seeds planted there in childhood, would burst up and out of that mind and become stories in and of themselves.

            I knew I was different when I was a kid, knew the other kids thought I was weird, and realized that even my family found me a little odd and probably wondered why I couldn’t be like the other kids (or maybe more like they’d been when they were my age). But I was who I was and today I am who I am. I like the way the story of my life has gone so far. As that unusual little boy, I loved stories. As an adult who’s still strange, but (I hope) not in a bad way, I still love stories, and I feel lucky that others enjoy the stories I now contribute to the world.

            When I was a toddler and it became apparent that my left hand was the dominant one, my great-grandmother suggested that the hand be tied behind my back to force me to become right-handed, but my mother and grandmother refused. I’m glad that when I grew into a slightly older kid and the eccentricities that came from my imagination and interest in fiction became obvious, nobody did anything similar to try to strangle my developing sense of wonder and love of storytelling. My parents may not have understood why I did the things I did, but they never actively discouraged me.

            And I hope that the parents out there now won’t worry too much if their kids seem to spend a little too much time reading or drawing or watching movies. As long as they don’t have any serious problems, as long as their schoolwork doesn’t suffer and they get some kind of exercise and they seem happy, be proud of them and encourage their interests. They just might grow up to make the books you like to read or the movies you like to watch. Every generation needs its dreamers. If we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t have had Ray Bradbury or Alfred Hitchcock or HP Lovecraft or so many other creators of the stories that have shaped the imaginations of millions of human beings.

            If your children are dreamers, please let them dream. 

7 Books That Changed My Life

Early this morning, on my way to sit down and check my e-mail, I caught a glimpse of my bookshelves and something made me stop for a minute and look. Hundreds of books stared back at me, many I've read at least once, some I've read many times, and quite a few I just haven't gotten around to yet. But among those many volumes are a handful that, for one reason or another, had such an impact on my mind (and heart too, in some cases) that they literally changed who I am to one degree or another, either by introducing me to a new genre or interest or doing something to inspire my writing or maybe even changing the way I think about the world we live in, or the worlds we could live in if things were just different enough to shift reality into something other than our familiar realm of existence. In appreciation of those personally important works, here is a list of seven books that really had an impact on me. There are others too, but these are the ones that jumped out at me today.

THE COMPLETE SHERLOCK HOLMES by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
I first "met" Sherlock Holmes when I was about 8, via the British TV series starring Jeremy Brett as the Great Detective. I was fascinated by everything: Holmes' brilliance and eccentricities, his colorful adversaries, his loyal companion Watson, and all the details that go to make up a mystery. My grandfather, noticing my interest in one of his favorite fictional characters, found his own copy of the complete Holmes canon, the one he'd owned since his boyhood in the 1930s, and gave it to me for Christmas. I still have it today and still refer to it anytime I need to double check something for the new Holmes stories that I've had the privilege to be allowed to write for Airship 27 Productions for the past few years. My love of detective stories began with Holmes, but certainly didn't end there. If not for Doyle's work, I wonder if I ever would have followed that fascination and found Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot or Peter Falk's brilliant portrayal of Lt. Columbo or countless other literary or film detectives.

CASINO ROYALE by Ian Fleming
The aforementioned Sherlock Holmes is probably my favorite fictional character, but also pretty high up on that list is James Bond. Like with Holmes, I knew Bond on screen before I ever met the literary version. To me, in my early childhood, Bond looked like Sean Connery or Roger Moore or Timothy Dalton or George Lazenby. When I did finally get to read Fleming's books, I began with the first one, Casino Royale. I'm glad that was the first one he wrote and the first one I read, because it had not, at the time, been made into a movie yet. Had I read, say, Goldfinger, first, I probably would have had images of Sean Connery and Gert Frobe running through my head the whole time. But because the first 007 story I read was not a movie yet, Fleming's words had their effect on me without cinematic memories getting in the way. Because of this, the Bond I see when I read Fleming is different than the guy in the movies, and hopefully closer to what Fleming intended. I like both Bonds now, the movie version and the one that comes in words on the page. My own first spy novel, coming soon, was inspired by both versions of Bond, as well as by all the spy fiction I read later after first discovering the genre because of Ian Fleming.

DRACULA by Bram Stoker
Forget every movie version of the famous vampire count. Forget the handsome face of Christopher Lee. Forget the romantic baggage added on to the character in Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation. Let all that slide out of your mind and lose yourself in the novel upon which all those movies were not-quite-based. Don't get me wrong, I love some of those movies, especially the Hammer ones, but this is the real Dracula, and one of the best (worst?) villains in literature. Stoker's choice in telling the story as a series of letters and journal entries was particularly inspired, as it allows the story to unfold as the characters experience it, letting the reader know just slightly more than any individual character does at any given moment. Of course, the two characters who actually have a firm understanding of just how dangerous things are getting, Dracula himself, and Van Helsing, aren't included in the narration (except for one section by Van Helsing toward the very end). Dracula is a slow, chilling, crawling, deepening nightmare of a book that will drag you in and not let go until you've made it to the end. It reaches a point where you must know what will happen next. That's the book that really cemented my love of vampire fiction and what eventually led to my writing 100,000 Midnights, the first of my own vampire series.

THE OCTOBER COUNTRY by Ray Bradbury
 When I was a kid, reading books meant for kids, a story was often just a story and the words were just there to move it along from one event to the next and eventually to its conclusion. I knew that things had to happen in stories, but I don't recall, at a young age, giving much thought to how important it was for some writers (the best writers, maybe) to choose which words served the story best. And then I discovered Ray Bradbury. Words never looked quite the same to me after that. Bradbury used them to build atmosphere, alter mood, make a story so much more than just a series of words describing events. I don't know if I can explain it any better than that, but I do know that The October Country  is my favorite of Bradbury's books, a wonderful collection of short stories, including such classics of horror and speculative fiction as "The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse," "Skeleton," "The Man Upstairs," and many more.

THE BEST OF H.P. LOVECRAFT: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre
I've since read almost all of Lovecraft's fiction and own many editions holding various stories in various orders under various groupings, but this sampler was my first taste of the absolutely unique sort of storytelling that we now call "Lovecraftian."
Lovecraft's work, so I've heard people say, isn't for everybody. Some people find it too thick with extravagant adjectives and antiquated phraseology and cyclopian....see? It's contagious!
But seriously, there's nothing else in the world like Lovecraft. Whether it's his Cthulhu stories or the Dream Cycle or anything in between, it's a unique, thrilling, often horrifying blend of myth, horror, and science fiction, a genre unto itself.

HYPERSPACE by Michio Kaku
As much as I love science-fiction, I'm also very interested in science fact. One of my favorite subjects is quantum physics. Although I'm fascinated by the concepts and theories, I'll come right out and honestly admit that I don't understand the complicated mathematics behind them. Dr. Kaku's book explains the amazing ideas of modern physics in an entertaining way that makes them clear, and even more interesting, to a mathematically-inept reader like me. You won't see your "reality" in the same way after reading this or any of his other books.

CREATURES OF LIGHT AND DARKNESS by Roger Zelazny
This is my favorite novel in the world. A mind-altering blend of Egyptian mythology and science-fantasy told in a way that I don't think any other writer can ever replicate, I was never quite the same after reading this for the first time and, strangely and wonderfully, it seems just slightly different with each subsequent reading, as if there are always nuances that remain hidden until I'm ready to discover them.
It starts out with a unique present-tense third person narrative, drifts into poetry in unexpected places, and ends as a play! Zelazny, it seems, was willing to break any rule, stretch any boundary, and do anything to get this story told, and it works perfectly.
As I've been writing this blog entry, I've realized something. Perhaps the reason I love this novel so much is that it really includes, in some way or another, all the qualities that make the other books on this list so special to me. "Creatures" gives the reader the intellectual exercise of a Sherlock Holmes mystery, the suspense of Bond, villains as terrifying as Dracula, epic events as cosmic in scope as anything Lovecraft ever imagined, exquisitely crafted prose worthy of Bradbury, and mind-bending concepts that could very well have come from (or might even go beyond) the things discussed in Hyperspace.
"Creatures" is a short book. The edition I have here is only 190 pages, but it packs more punch than any other book I've ever read. I can't really say it's influenced my writing, because I could never be as bold as Roger Zelazny when it comes to finding a truly new way to tell a story, but it's certainly influenced my imagination, and I think that's even more important.