CREEPING THROUGH THE NIGHTSCAPE:

AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID MORRELL

David Morrell is a bestselling author of over twenty novels, including: First Blood (which was the source for the Rambo movies), Testament, Blood Oath, The Brotherhood of the Rose, The Fraternity of the Stone, The Fifth Profession, Assumed Identity, Burnt Sienna, Extreme Denial, Long Lost and The Protector. His nonfiction study, Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing, is considered one of the best guidebooks to the craft currently available for those who yearn to be writers.

While better known for his high-octane thrillers, Morrell's stories frequently take very dark, fantastical turns, as witnessed in his collections Black Evening and Nightscape. Indeed, many of his mainstream thrillers contain elements that would be perfectly at home in a horror novel. But Morrell rarely concerns himself with the supernatural; instead the horror is drawn from the experience of fear itself and not necessarily what causes it.

Still, The Totem (1979) is generally considered Morrell's only straight horror novel. I would argue that Creepers, his latest, is another.

The story follows a reporter on the night he joins a group of urban explorers--'creepers'--as they infiltrate The Paragon Hotel, a long-abandoned building scheduled for demolition. But within the rat-infested hotel, deadly secrets lie waiting to be discovered, and soon the creepers are fighting to stay alive.

KPB: David, you're almost as well known for your intensive research as you are for the novels you do it for. You've studied evasive and defensive driving, wilderness survival, executive protection, crime-scene investigation, and bomb disposal, to name a few, often at the risk of personal injury. In Creepers, your characters are urban explorers--dare I ask how deeply you immersed yourself in the world of infiltration?

DM: Although I didn’t know it, I guess I’ve been an urban adventurer since I was a child.  As I note in my afterword to the novel, I had a less than happy youth.  Although my mother and stepfather didn’t hit each other, their arguments were certainly violent.  To escape, I wandered the streets of the run-down area in which we lived.  I spent a lot of time exploring abandoned buildings.  In fact, I can’t remember an old building or tunnel that I didn’t want to go into.  Eventually, I learned that I wasn’t alone.  Around the world, people have made an organized activity out of this.  They call themselves urban explores, but their nickname is “creepers.”  On Google, there are hundreds of thousands of websites about them.    A couple of years ago, I read a newspaper article about creepers in Buffalo, where much of the downtown area has been abandoned.  As I learned about their exploits, I felt I’d found a home.  They even use special-operations terms like “infiltration” that have parallels with some of my novels.  In fact, one of the best urban-explorer websites is called infiltration.org.  The site’s motto is “place you’re not supposed to go.”

KPB: In the novel, The Paragon Hotel is incredibly vivid (and frightening). Is it based on a real place, or solely a product of your imagination?

DM: The Paragon Hotel is based on a number of abandoned hotels in blighted Asbury Park, NJ, where the book is set.  In the novel, I devote a section to the rise and fall of that area, which was once the crown jewel of the US eastern seaboard.  To existing buildings, I added my fascination with the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright.  Some years ago, I wrote a semi-horror novel called Double Image, which has an eerie, magnificent house that was influenced by Mayan architecture.  That house was based on a real house designed by Wright’s son and owned by the silent-screen movie star Ramon Navarro.  In Creepers, I decided to create a much bigger version of that building.  It was fascinating to imagine the entire seven-story structure with all its intricacy and history.  My afterword to Creepers is called “An Obsession with the Past.”  That title reflects my approach to the entire book.  I wanted the reader to feel trapped in a hotel that encapsulated the past.

KPB: There's also a website for the hotel (www.theparagonhotel.com). What can interested readers expect to find there?

DM: You need to be careful when you type the address for that website.  If you leave out “the,” you’ll find yourself learning about a real Paragon Hotel in England, a very pleasant establishment that bears no resemblance to the hotel I imagined in Asbury Park.  My novel’s website, www.theparagonhotel.com, was at first only one page upon which there was a timeline for the hotel’s history, along with photographs.  But as of early June, the website is much more ambitious.  It includes a brief animated presentation about the novel.  It has my afterword and material about urban explorers and photographs from Asbury Park in its glory.  It has an interview with me and an essay by some creepers who went to Asbury Park as it is now and took photographs.  There are plenty of surprises.

KPB: Creepers is written in 'real time' -- a narrative technique seldom employed in modern fiction. Can you explain what this involves, and whether or not it made the book more difficult to write?

DM: Yes, Creepers is written in real time.  The plot concerns five creepers who spend a night in the Paragon Hotel.  The action begins at 9 pm on a cold Saturday night in October.  It ends at five in the morning.  Every second of the intervening eight hours is accounted for.  Every breath.  Every line of dialogue.  There are no summaries of time.  No jumps forward.  When the characters relieve their bladders into plastic bottles they bring with them, the reader is there.  No cutting away from anything.  It’s a moment-by-moment technique that I can’t recall seeing in another book.  In fact, it may be one-of-a-kind.  When I decided to do the book in that manner, I was very excited.  During my long career, I’ve always tried new approaches.  The technique made the book difficult to write in the sense that I had to make every second as interesting as I could—to keep building the suspense, increasing it, tightening it.  The relentless nature of the time scheme took charge.  Suddenly I was writing seven days a week, twelve hours at each session.  Most days, I had trouble returning to the present when I finished.

KPB: According to the author's note at the end of Creepers, in your early years you were a novice 'creeper' yourself. During your covert explorations, did you ever encounter anything as unsettling as the things your characters discover in The Paragon Hotel?

DM: I was around ten years old, exploring some storm drains.  I encountered a man who claimed that strange-looking animals lived at the end of one of the tunnels.  Maybe that’s where the idea for the mutated animals in the novel came from.  In any case, I followed this guy as he led me toward the end of the tunnel.  I was raised in a bar district.  I had good street smarts, and as soon as I came to an adjoining tunnel, I ran away.  He chased me, hollering.  But because he had to stoop in the tunnel, I had the advantage and escaped.  On a couple of other occasions, I stepped on a rusty nail and got bitten by a cat.  Both wounds resulted in blood poisoning.  Another time, a wall of earth collapsed on me. Sometimes, I’m amazed that I lived to grow up.

KPB: The main theme of the novel is the past and how an obsession with it can ultimately lead to one's undoing. To me, this is the purest form of haunting, and I found it managed so effectively in the book it felt at every turn as if I was reading a haunted house story. And yet, there's not a ghost in sight. Do you think there is a misconception among readers about what exactly horror in literature means?

DM: I think that a lot of readers, even fans of the genre, have a misconception about what horror is.  Ghosts, banshees, clanking chains, whatever—these are only a means to an end.  Every genre is partially defined by the emotion it evokes.  Science fiction creates awe.  Romance creates sentiment.  Mysteries create puzzlement.  Horror is about fear, and in that sense, much of my work fits solidly in the genre.  It gives me great pleasure to have been awarded two Stokers from the Horror Writers Association.  I’ve been nominated two other times, and twice for World Fantasy Awards, but seldom have I depicted an out-and-out supernatural situation.  Almost always, the horror is psychological.  The Paragon Hotel in Creepers definitely feels like a haunted house, but as you say, there’s not a ghost in sight, and yet you swear they are present.  Every genre needs to reinvent itself periodically, and in this novel, I think I found a way to do it.

KPB: Creepers is published by CDS Books, a relatively new publisher whose emphasis seems to be on distribution. How did this new relationship come about, and have you committed to CDS for future books?

DM: The letters CDS stand for Client Distribution Services.  The company is the largest book distributor in the country and probably in the world.  Each year, they also publish from five to ten books.  Not many.  The point is that they only publish books that they are 100 percent committed to.   Then they use every element of their vast distribution network to make sure that the books get into stores.  In my 33 years as a published writer, I have never been treated so well.  They gave me virtually every promotional help that I asked for.  That included letting my daughter, Sarie, a former Random House publicist, be in charge of all publicity.  For the first time since 1995, I’m going on a big publicity tour.  I’ve had publishers who produced only 400 advanced reading copies.  CDS ordered 4,000.  That ratio applies to all of CDS’s efforts.  I’m in heaven.

KPB: The cover art for Creepers is indeed creepy (see it at www.davidmorrell.net), and very different from your previous covers, which generally displayed a weapon of some sort (my favorite being the knife from The Protector). Are you worried that hardcore fans of your thrillers will be put off by what they might perceive to be a haunted hotel horror novel?

DM: The cover for Creepers makes people say, “Wow.”  It’s as atmospheric as can be.  Moody.  Haunting.  A sign on a cob-webbed door.  “DO NOT DISTURB.”  A light on it, probably from a flashlight beam.  The image perfectly communicates the feeling of the novel.  On the back of the book, there’s a larger image that depicts the entire door, along with stained wallpaper and holes in the floor.  It’s easily the strongest, most artistic cover any American publisher has given me.  To open the book is to open the door.  Yikes.  By contrast, my previous publisher Warner Books often put weapons on the covers of my books.  As you note, the real knife on the cover of The Protector is particularly distinctive.  I thought those covers were effective.  But readers are changing as publishing does, and it seemed time to take a new direction.  This has been a constant in my work.  I don’t do cookie-cutter books.  Yes, they’re all thrillers.  They all have action.  But after that, they explore new territory.  I decided it was time to emphasize the psychological horror that lurks in my work.  I’m reminded of a recent quote I saw from Bruce Springsteen.  He was asked if he thought he’d lose some of his audience because his new album Devils & Dust is acoustic.  His answer was revealing.  “As an artist,” he said, “you’re always in the process of trying to make people care about your obsessions.”  Well, I can’t compare myself to the Boss (although he does make a brief appearance in Creepers), but I know what he means.  You’ve got two choices.  You can pander to an audience by following the latest trend.  Or else you can follow your own path and explore directions that are meaningful to you.  Creepers is meaningful to me.  As you said in an earlier question, “the main theme of the novel is the past and how an obsession with it can ultimately lead to one’s undoing.”  I totally believe this.  Most of our psychological problems seize us because guilt or shame or anger or whatever don’t want us to let go of the past and move on.  As far as I’m concerned, yesterday is death while today and tomorrow are life.

KPB: This is a question I've always wanted to ask you: If you ever found yourself in a potentially lethal situation (take any one of many from The Protector or Extreme Denial, for example), do you think you could survive by using what you've learned through your research? Or is learning tradecraft for writing purposes a lot different than applying it to real life situations, with fear and adrenaline in the way?

DM: To research my novels, I’ve had a lot of training in firearms, knives, surveillance, car fighting, etc.  A couple of times, that training has in fact saved me.  The first incident that comes to mind involves an elderly neighbor whose handyman went crazy and thought he was having a romance with her.  She fled her property and ran down the street to our house.  It was something I’d asked her to do if she ever felt threatened by anyone.  I’m outraged by men who pick on women, and I’ll go to great lengths to help the victim.  In this case, I drove her to her house so that she could get her purse and some other things she needed for an important appointment.  But she was afraid to go into her house.  While the handyman and I stared at each other, she picked up what she needed.  She came back and got in my car, but as I opened my door, I saw the handyman charging from the garage with a big power saw in his hands.  I scrambled into my car, started it, and looked through the rear window as the handyman raised the power saw to throw it through the window.  Fortunately, I had just returned from a car fighting course, and I used one of the techniques I’d been taught.  The woman had a gravel driveway.  I stomped the accelerator as hard as I could and churned up the biggest cloud of stones and dust you can imagine.  The guy vanished in a chaos of flying gravel.  By then, I was speeding along the driveway.  A phone call later, four police cars arrived to cart the guy away.  But that’s an exception.  The important thing about the training I received is that it made me more observant.  I don’t go anywhere that I don’t maintain what security operatives called “condition yellow,” a generalized condition of alertness that assesses the environment, notices trouble, and avoids it.  Condition yellow contrasts with condition white, which is basically the way most people lead their lives, so unaware that they practically have a sign attached to them that says, “Steal my stuff.  Hurt me.”  In this regard, I recommend that everyone read a non-fiction book by Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear.

KPB: What can we look forward to seeing from you in the future?

DM: Ah, the future. I’ve been approached by a major comic book company to do a six-episode story about one of their major characters.  We’re still negotiating, and I can’t be more specific until it’s a done deal.  But I can tell you this--the idea I presented goes against the cliché of what people generally think comic books are about.  I have in mind something that is ambitious and moving and meaningful, something that explores the idea of what it means to be a hero.  The reader will get inside this character and understand him fully for the first time, and in the end the reader will possibly weep.

KPB: Thanks a million for your time, David!

This interview originally appeared in Subterranean Press Newsletter