INTO THE TOYBOX:

AN INTERVIEW WITH AL SARRANTONIO

A former Doubleday editor, Al Sarrantonio is the author of over thirty books, including Moonbane, Skeletons, The Boy with Penny Eyes, Totentanz, October, Orangefield and more recently, Hallows Eve and the collections Toybox and Hornets and Others. He is also the acclaimed editor of such notable anthologies as Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction, Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy and 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense.

KPB: Another sparkling review in Publisher’s Weekly (for Hornets and Others). You must be delighted. You’ve been writing for many years now; how important do you consider reviews? Do you, in your next work, consciously set about avoiding the things a particular critic might have considered a flaw in your last?

AS: The humorous answer is: devour the good ones and ignore the bad ones!  But the fact is reviews are vastly important to the ego, minimally important to the work.  They have to be.  This is my opinion, of course.  Since I have a sinfully healthy ego I read them with a magnifying glass, but then, out of artistic imperative, completely ignore them when I'm working.  Anything otherwise would be counterproductive to the work. You must remember that book reviewers, the best ones, write for readers, not writers.  Their function is to say: will you enjoy this book? Here’s why I think you will (or won’t).  I used to be a book reviewer (for the late lamented Night Cry magazine, which was an offshoot of Twilight Zone Magazine back in the 80s., and for a good while after that Mystery Scene Magazine) but I had to give it up because (A) it didn't pay enough and (B) I was losing writer friends by being honest.  I do understand the critic's dilemma: tell the truth and make enemies. It’s tough to be a good critic. That said, it sure is fun to read good reviews.

KPB: Some authors will wait a considerable amount of time before putting together a collection. Indeed your own collection, Toybox, was a long time coming. What then, made you decide to put out another one (Hornets and Others) only four years later?

AS: Toybox was in the works for more than a decade.  If you look at the copyright page, most of the stories were written in a ten year period between the early 80s and early 90s.  The bad news is, it's almost impossible to sell a short story collection to a mainstream publisher these days, although Toybox did end up with a Leisure paperback reprint. The good news is, the small presses are picking up the slack.  Thank heavens for Cemetery Dance and Subterranean and Small Beer and Golden Gryphon and the rest.  As much or even more so than the magazines, they're keeping the short story alive, especially as far as permanence goes.  As for Hornets and Others, it's just me dipping into the well again.  Hell, I've got enough horror short stories for a third collection, which I’m putting together now!

KPB: A number of your stories take place in that most appealing of seasons, Halloween. What is it about Halloween, and autumn in general, that appeals to you as a writer?

AS: Halloween is Autumn, plain and simple, just like Christmas is Winter.  That one day (October 31st) embodies everything that the transitional season of Fall is: the chill in the air, frost on the pumpkin, the smell of burning leaves, the hard bite out of a crisp apple just off the tree, the whole nine yards.  Plus, Halloween has the added bonus of pageantry (costumes, black and orange decorations, etc.) masking extremely deep mysteries: death, harvest (with the anxiety of renewal of the earth for the next planting), the coming of Winter and old age. As with most things made jolly and "safe" for children, Halloween hides some pretty hairy stuff behind all the fun.

KPB: You’re known primarily as a short story writer rather than a novelist, despite having a considerable number of novels under your belt. Which form are you most comfortable with?

AS: They're very different, thank God.  I enjoy them both, but I do enjoy writing short stories more because of the concision and discipline involved.  Novels are like landscape paintings: a huge canvas with all kinds of things going on, things stuck in corners, perhaps a joke or two peeking out from behind a tree.  Think of Brueghel's painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus: you don't even notice the young boy plunging into the sea until you've seen a score of other things: the stately ships with their sails filled with wind heading for the harbor, the distant mountains, a great bird flying above the far cliffs, the ploughman and fisherman in the foreground, unheeding, going about their business. Never mind all the symbolism Brueghel liked to pack into his pictures.  W.H. Auden wrote a remarkable poem about that painting.  Novels are like that: stuff all over the place and lots of space to do different things.  Short stories are utterly different.  They're like Swiss watches: if you look inside, every gear and spring has to be in exactly the right place for it to work.  I can hold an entire short story in my head, and fiddle with it there: "If I move this word here, then the jack in the box will spring on the reader there."  It's an obscene amount of power, when you think about it.  You get to completely manipulate another person for the twenty minutes or so it takes for her/him to read what you've written.  For that twenty minutes (or whatever) that reader is yours. It inspires craft and art, I think.  Hell, if you're gonna own somebody for twenty minutes you might as well do it right!

KPB: You’ve also helmed a couple of terrific anthologies. Did 999 make the impact you’d hoped it would?

AS: Yes and no. The book got a lot of attention when it first came out.  Some of it was hype -- and I'm afraid I contributed to that -- but that was more out of economic than artistic necessity.  The publisher paid a bunch of money for the thing, and I thought they should get their money's worth.  I'm proud of a couple of things about that book.  One is that I actually delivered more than Avon asked for, since the William Peter Blatty short novel that ends the collection was not something they expected.  He wasn't on my "You Gotta Have These Authors" list.  I went out and got him myself.  A good friend (and well-known author) put me on the scent, and I spent a dizzying March morning and afternoon trading E-mails with him, East coast to West coast and back again, and eventually ended up with that wonderful piece.  The thing I'm most proud about 999 is that it's still in print in a Perennial trade paperback edition. Five years in print ain't bad for an original anthology. 

KPB: Your introduction to 999 was an informative commentary on the state of the genre at the time. Have you noticed a change, for better or worse, in the market in the five years since writing those words?

AS: Surprisingly, mostly for the better.  Of course I hoped 999 would do even better than it did, and spark a renaissance in horror literature, but that was mostly daydreaming.  But (and I take no credit for this!) if you look at the horror field now and in 1999, I think it actually is much healthier now.  More books being published, more short story outlets (though still no major monthly magazine, dammit!), more small press action, more of everything.  I'm sure 999 was just an early part of that wave, not a cause.  There were too many other people out there who were doing wonderful things at the time, and continue to do so: Steve Jones and Ellen Datlow, to name two.  But who cares why the field is in better shape now!  As long as there’s more of it, some of it has to be good, right?

KPB: A number of your titles have been given the specialty press treatment (999, Orangefield, Toybox, Hallow’s Eve, Hornets and Others). From someone who spent many years manning a desk at Doubleday—a major New York publisher—what do you consider to be the positive and negative aspects of specialty presses compared to mass-market publishing?

AS: Specialty presses (I think I actually said this in the intro to 999) are like hyenas: the big publishers are lions, bringing down the elk and eating the biggest portions, and the small publishers dart in and nip at the leavings.  But what leavings!  Most short story collections originate in the specialty presses now, as well as many original anthologies and, of course, deluxe autographed editions of mainstream publisher books.  I think that big and small publishers at this point in time perfectly complement one another.  There’s room for everybody at the table (or on the Serengeti), as long as some excellent work is being published, and I think it is.  There’s still lots of junk, but there’s always been junk and always will be.  As long as the readership continues to support all of this (and that’s the real question: is there enough readership?  Will there be enough new readers in the future who love this fiction?) the market will continue to be fairly healthy.  In that sense, I’m much more optimistic than I was when 999 came out.  You can’t deny that the film industry is cranking out horror (even though most of it is complete garbage) as fast as it can.  There just seems to be more of everything than there was five years ago. Who knows?  Maybe we are in another Golden Age, like I’d hoped!

KPB: Your most recent releases were Hallows Eve and Hornets and Others, a horror novel and collection respectively, but up next is a science fiction novel, Haydn of Mars. Do you worry that younger readers, who might have discovered your work through your newer titles, might not follow you into space?

AS: Hell, I’ve been writing science fiction for twenty-five years!  As well as fantasy, and mysteries and Westerns!  Part of my problem is that I wear so many hats. Perhaps if I’d concentrated on one genre I might have made more of a name for myself in one field.  But I’m just too restless for that, I’m afraid.  My hat trick of original anthologies, 999 (horror), Redshift (sf) and Flights (fantasy) proves that, I think.  If pressed, though, I’d have to say I consider myself primarily a horror writer.  More than two thirds of my output has been in the horror field, and it’s the one I keep coming back to and enjoy the most.  I consider it the most important of all the genres, which is why I’d like to see it get more respect.  Science fiction deals with other worlds, and fantasy with dreamed-up places and westerns with, well, the American West – but horror fiction deals first and foremost with the human mind, which is, as I’ve said before, the scariest place of all.  And horror is, by that definition, the closest genre to literature.

KPB: Can you tell us a little bit about Haydn of Mars?

AS: Sure!  Haydn is actually the first of a trilogy.  This will actually be my second science fiction trilogy.  The first was my Five Worlds series of a few years ago.  In those books (Exile, Journey and Return) I tried to bring some of the trappings of horror fiction into sf.  There are some gruesome scenes and characters right out of horror – one of them, a lipless fellow (his own brother committed the act with a pair of snips) called the Machine Master of Mars, could have been lifted from Phantom of the Opera!  I wish more horror readers had tried those books – but they were marketed as straight space opera, with beautiful Donato covers.  Great reviews (see, I do notice!) but the books sort of came and went.  I think they’re three of the best novels I’ve ever written, and I’d love to put the three of them into one volume someday, titled Five Worlds.  Haydn of Mars is more straight science fantasy.  If you took Clifford Simak’s City and replaced his intelligent dogs with cats, and set the whole thing on a future terraformed Mars which still retains a lot of its Red Planet character, you’d have it.  The book is told from the first person view of a female feline.  Something new for me.  I’m an amateur astronomer, so I’ve had a ball writing about Mars.

KPB: What’s up next for you?

AS: Two more Mars books, A Little Yellow Book of Fevered Stories from Borderlands Press, as well as the next book in my Halloween Cycle.  This new one will also take place in my fictional town of Orangefield, NY, and be called Halloweenland. It will be a mix of Halloween horror story and Carnival-Comes-to-Town tale – something I haven’t done since my novel Totentanz, when I was in my Bradbury-tribute phase.  There are two new Orangefield novellas coming out, also, The Pumpkin Boy, from Endeavor Press, and The Baby, which will be in a new collection by someone named Burke.  This will bring my Halloween Cycle to a total of three novels (Orangefield, Hallows Eve, Halloweenland), three novellas (the two just mentioned plus the very first Orangefield story, “Hornets,” which will be reprinted in Hornets and Others) as well as various stories and such still on the drawing board.

KPB: Thanks for your time, Al!

AS: My pleasure.

This interview originally appeared in Subterranean Press Newsletter